[unclebucknasty]

My thought exactly: we've gone so far afield with this ridiculous notion of "sameness" between sexes that we actually now need "serious" research to "debunk" what was so obviously never true. "This just in: women and men are not exactly the same!"

The real problem is that our society tends to equate sameness with acceptability as its preferred mode of "tolerance". This has the paradoxical effect of re-inforcing the negative ways we view our differences (e.g. discrimination). That is, the desire to claim that we are all exactly the same is an implicit statement that it would be somehow problematic if we were not.

So, the fact that we are obviously different means that we are attempting to sell oursleves a lie that we never buy, while allowing our negative feelings about our very real differences go unchecked.

[ufo]

The problem is that while on average there are significant differences between men and women, the individual variation within men and within women is so much larger than these sex-based differences that sex is not a good predictor for behavior in the majority of the cases.

[ThrustVectoring]

It depends on the difference. For grip strength, the median male is approximately equivalent to an elite female athlete.

[ufo]

I was thinking more about behavioral differences. For physical things like strength or height there is a very noticeable difference between the sexes.

[unclebucknasty]

Well, I'm not so sure how constructive it is to try making behavioral predictions about people based on general categories (race, sex, etc.) in the first place. I think it's far more useful to seek understanding and respect.