Women and Strength: The Definitive Study.

[Luther]

The recent thread about women and strength made me realize how biased and uninformed is the average net-citizen. I believe that correctly modeling human strength (male and female) in GURPS is going to help those GMs that care about realism and world consistency. Having a human female lens also helps to come up quickly with believable NPCs.

If you don't care about realism, historical, pseudo-historical or modern campaigns, feel free to ignore the following. If you want to understand the truth about women and strength, and possibly apply it to your games, please read on.

The following post was buried in one of those monster threads about gender differences. I feel enough time has past to revise, spell check and repost it here. Note that the following numbers have nothing to do with what female PCs or strong female NPCs have to be. It's just a GM tool, to help him with NPCs and world consistency.

---

Average man ST = 10

Average woman ST = 8

Another option, if you are going to house rule Arm ST as a secondary stat (it is just an advantage, you can't lower it in vanilla GURPS), is the following:

Average woman ST = 9, -1 Arm ST

If I'm going to use the build table (B18), I choose height/weight as per men, then apply just -1 to ST.

Here is why.

According to studies [1,2] women possess about two thirds of the strength of men.
The strength differences aren't consistent for all muscle groups and research [3] showed that:

- upper-body: 40%-60% men's strength. (GURPS ST 7)
- lower-body: 70%-75% men's strength. (GURPS ST 8.5)

Those are absolute strength levels, not kg per kg. If you want to compare a
woman and a man with the same body weight, results will be closer:

The average young (20-29) American young male weights 76 kg. [4]
The average young (20-29) American female weights 60 kg. [4]

Male relative stregth: 100/76 = 1.32
Female relative strength: 66/60 = 1.1
Female/Male relative strength ratio: 1.1/1.32 = 0.83 (83%)

So a woman weighting as an average man would have ST 9 in GURPS terms.
The lower female strength is mostly due to less lean body mass.

More interesting is the strength-to-lean-body-mass ratio. That is, when strength is
calculated per cross-sectional area of muscle, there isn't significant gender difference. [5]

All other factors equal, men and women having the same lean body mass have equal strength.


---
[1] Fox E, Bowers R, Foss M: The Physiological Basis for Exercise and Sport, Madison, WI, Brown and Benchmark, 1993

[2] Stone MH, Borden RA: Modes and methods of resistance training. Strength Conditioning 1997;19(4):18-24

[3] National Strength and Conditioning Association: Position Paper: Strength Training for Female Athletes. National Strength and Conditioning Association, Colorado Springs, 1990

[4] NHANES III survey. The NHANES III was a comprehensive survey of the American population during years 1988-1994.

[5] Strength Training for Women: Debunking Myths That Block Opportunity William P. Ebben, MS, MSSW, CSCS; Randall L. Jensen, PhD THE PHYSICIAN AND SPORTSMEDICINE - VOL 26 - NO. 5 - MAY 98