I'm pretty annoyed today, for nominal reasons ranging between ‘petty’ and ‘doesn’t even make sense’. I’m not entirely sure how or if to take oneself seriously when one has such absurd grievances. But that’s a question for another time—I’m here now to tell you about my one potentially valid peeve.

I understand that gender is complicated and difficult, for the whole species (and honestly probably more so for some other species). And it can be hard to tell exactly if anyone is behaving badly regarding it, at least in my modern bubble. Maybe women just aren’t that into designing programming languages? Maybe the thing I’m saying is just boring and a man is saying a more interesting thing?

But a thing that is undeniable is that women want to open jars, dammit! What’s your nuanced explanation there, Bonne Maman? Does the proper amount of friction for maintaining spread safety fall just between the male and female human grip strength distributions?

This study suggests that would be about 400N Fmax (though this would not avert most elite female athletes acquiring jam, see second figure, and the pictured participants are young adults):

distributions of hand grip forces men vs women

distributions of hand grip forces men vs women

The distributions are really surprisingly not-overlapping!

90% of females produced less force than 95% of males. Though female athletes were significantly stronger (444 N) than their untrained female counterparts, this value corresponded to only the 25th percentile of the male subjects.

We know that men and women have different grip strengths! We know that about half of people are women! Why do so many containers require women asking a man for help in order to open them? (Or carrying around an opening tool or living in a kitchen?)

Yes, strength required to open packaging ranges across a wide distribution, but I note that very few are impossible for anyone to open, so it seems like some effort somewhere goes into keeping them in the feasible range, and that effort does not seem to care about it being reliably feasible for people like me. I don’t imagine Bonne Maman wants to stop women getting to their jam—I imagine that nobody cares.

I thought about this most when I lived in a group house with a shared bulk stash of Gatorade, and any time my woman housemate or I wanted to drink a red one we’d have to ask a guy to open it for us. But these days I also often hurt my hands opening (or failing to open) things, and while I’m sure I’m low in the femal...

NBAP

NBAP