Walking home at night is not the same for women | Hacker News Reader

Walking home at night is not the same for women

news.byu.edu

57 pointsvinnyglennon108 comments

It’s a shame this study appears to have been conducted so poorly, the topic is very interesting.

The study had people click on photos of where their interest would be if they were walking. They were not eye-tracked when actually walking. This is a significant difference. Particularly because at night your peripheral vision is much more acute at detecting shape/silhouette/tonal variation and in my experience also motion. The latter is very relevant for detecting threats.

I was poor growing up had to walk a lot, including at night. A lot of time was spent walking in not the best areas! Most of my teenage life seemed to be spent in the dark too, if I ever wanted to see friends! And then military service with endless night exercises. Add to that living in the UK with 17+ hours of darkness in the winter. I can definitely say that after decades of walking at night and many many thousands of miles (I have a nearly 200 already this year already) you learn there’s a certain way of ‘seeing’ without looking at something directly. So I very much question the claims of the study in so much as it states where your eyes actually look when walking in real world circumstances.

What I don’t doubt is that in general women have more to worry about and fear in public spaces, that their attention is drawn to different things than men in some circumstances and that there likely is a difference in scene scanning behaviour.

A proper study on this would be very interesting to see and might actually help better inform the design of public spaces for night time use.

I hope they make a follow up study with some kind of VR contraption. It would be also great to get a read of things like heart rate, blood pressure and things like adrenaline.

This is cool study, and the results match my intuition. Without trying to go off-topic, it's interesting that the actual study involved no walking, or even eye tracking. The data is self-reported from showing the participants images on a computer, and then having them click at where they would look.

Years ago, when I did my driver's license, they showed us a study done in the freaking 80s, that captured with full eye-tracking what drivers were looking at while actually driving.

With that technology now available pretty cheap off the shelf, I'm surprised at how low-tech this is. Is research funding in public health really this low?

Study did not look into actual walking, but asked participants to use imagination and click on areas of interest. While the title is certainly true, this study does not support it. It's a different context.

Yeah - isn't this more measuring anticipated fear of a situation vs actual risk? Of course the risk _is_ higher if you're less able to defend yourself, but we're talking different measurements here. And I don't buy that the different visual scanning patterns necessarily mean what the article suggests.

Something you're not allowed to say today: there are differences between men and women, and some of those probably include the ways that we scan for danger. Perhaps males are more worried about armed threats up ahead while females are more worried about stalking panthers in the bushes, etc (pick your scenario).

I would think I'd also be very mindful of risk if I was very small or weak, very young, visibly injured, etc - regardless if I was a man/boy or not. These things seem like basic primal wisdom that transcends species.

That's quite the deal breaker

I'd really like to see an expanded study that included pictures of both night time and daylight, in various settings (downtown, affluent neighborhood, sketchy area, highway, forest, hiking trail, jungle, desert, etc). I think it would help to tease out what is instinctual vs learned behavior.

That would tell us a lot about where participants from their pool click on images, but I'm not sure it tells us anything about any questions worth caring about.

We all know that women are and must be more wary while doing things like walking alone at night, but we aren't going to learn about it from clicking on pictures with a mouse.

Study would be much better if the participants were wearing glasses that surreptitiously tracked actual eye movements while walking home, rather than pointing at points-of-interest in an image.

For some reason this media coverage just mentions nighttime, but the actual study had participants do this process for daytime photos as well, and honestly it shows a similar pattern – so not sure the evidence supports the claim in the coverage (as usual).

And that part is not addressed in the study – anecdotally, women are much more scared of walking alone in the dark than in broad daylight. So if pointing out the periphery is an indication of fear, why is it still a strong tendency from females in the daylight, when they should be less scared?

I don't get from the post at all the correlation of "environmental scanning women conduct as they walk in the dark" and "Walking home at night is not the same for women". What am I missing here?

Women scan their environments constantly (hyper-vigilence) when in places where men typically do not (walking in the dark being one of those).

I should have quoted a different part of the post. How about the correlation with

> clear visual evidence of the constant environmental scanning women conduct as they walk in the dark, a safety consideration the study shows is unique to their experience.

I just don't get how this is clear evidence about "safety considerations"

From the article:

> "The resulting heat maps represent perhaps what people are thinking or feeling or doing as they are moving through these spaces"

Do you have an alternative theory that's more compelling than the one that many, many women report about their own thinking?

Firstly, I have no doubt that women are a lot more vulnerable at night.

That said, I don't think this "study" is fair.

> asked them to click on areas in the photo that caught their attention

I too, would click on whatever is lit up in the centre, but when actually walking at night I constantly watch my surroundings, as anyone probably does that didn't grow up a sheltered life or in a super safe area.

Their point is women largely WEREN'T clicking in the lit up center, even though the men were. Your counter only presumes that men would look more like the women's clicking in real life, but you havent explained the observable difference in clicking behaviors by posing that, it's a different question.

My point is that clicking on an image is not representative of what they would look at when actually walking through the area.

There is a pretty good argument to be made that asking someone to imagine walking in these scenes and click on areas of interest/concern is at least a partial proxy for where they will actually look when placed in that context. It is not reasonable to wholesale dismiss studies and their results simply because you think they could have operationalized their hypothesis differently or better. These undergrads did a pretty respectable job within the scientific resources at their disposal, and have presented a real result; now science must grapple with what that result is telling us and why these differences occurred. Moreover, one could argue that to your point, if clicking is not actually looking then why is there a difference at all? It's just clicking on a picture right?

It could be that men rely more on peripheral vision to identify threats on the side possibly?

An interesting off the cuff alternative hypothesis that could be tested in a future study for sure. Though if I were the authors before I did that study I would do a pretty big lit review of gender differences in foveal vs peripheral visual engagement. Is there any evidence that men might use their peripheral vision differently from women in the first place? (This is just a thought exercise, I don't have an answer and am not asking for one)

[dupe]

More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39325648

Itself dupe of a previously flagged submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39301091

Not too surprising, but it's interesting that if women are scanning for threats, they're probably doing it wrong as your peripheral night vision is better:

https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/31903/why-is-my-...

Your peripheral vision has greater ACUITY at night but that doesn't improve its RESOLUTION. Your peripheral vision will be better able to alert you to movements at night. You will still be better able to identify objects - and threats - with your focal vision.

> Your peripheral vision will be better able to alert you to movements at night. You will still be better able to identify objects - and threats - with your focal vision.

In other words, you'll notice potential threats with peripheral vision first, so your eyes should not be darting around to all of the dark places as the heat maps show, unless you have cause due to movement or something. That was my point.

That might be an artifact of using pictures of paths instead of actually walking the paths for the study. It seems that the brain, despite the lack of peripheral in the study, still wants to focus on those highlighted areas.

It's almost as if clicking on photos with a mouse isn't a very good way to measure night walking behavior, isn't it?

Women often observe that men are eager to correct them and explain what they are doing wrong. I can’t help reading your post with that in mind.

And I can't help but notice that your sexist framing does nothing but distract from a factual discussion.

Despite the supposedly obvious nature of certain conventional wisdom, scientific study is still important.

>Chaney and co-authors Alyssa Baer and Ida Tovar showed pictures of campus areas at Utah Valley University, Westminster, BYU and the University of Utah to participants and asked them to click on areas in the photo that caught their attention.

That seems like an interesting way to handle this. I'm not sure how much I believe that data is entirely accurate.

I met some folks who tried using eye tracking to make their software more efficient (the cameras were very apparent, this wasn't some secret study), they compared that to what people told them they focused on in the software and they found that users were terrible narrators as far as telling them what they spent time on or looked at.

Both bits of data were handy for them, but I'm not sure just clicking on an image makes sense here.

The article then goes on to tie this to violence ... that seems like a pretty big leap. Doesn't mean it isn't true, but I'd like to see something more of a real clear connection to the images specifically. It's possible because of the threat of violence women are more observant of the periphery .. or they just do that naturally?

Do they look around more in general & in the daytime I would wonder too.

>Why can’t we live in a world where women don’t have to think about these things?

Human nature. Baked-in survival and reproduction strategies.

Wouldn't that imply that the men -- the protectors -- are doing more scanning and are more aware of their surroundings?

My first thought was the actual publication reads like a student paper, especially the methods. Lo and behold:

> Acknowledgments

The Skaggs Faculty Mentoring Award at BYU for its financial support to mentor undergraduate students in research.

Yea. Overall, the methodology itself appears sound, though this subject is outside my own wheelhouse and I don't feel like doing a full review. But stuff like this:

> Knowing the existence of statistical clusters naturally leads to seeking to discern between those clusters globally and locally, that is, are these clusters arranged in different places in the images between genders and if so, where at?

is really odd to see in a methods section. My biggest surface critique, though, and a knock on both the faculty advisor and the peer reviewers/editors for this journal, is that there is zero explanation of how the authors operationalized "entrapment" in their photos. Moreover, there was nothing stopping them from just explicitly excluding people who were familiar with their non-BYU locations (it's a simple Qualtrics option) which would have strengthened their operationalization of familiar va unfamiliar.

That said, it's an interesting study and a clever way to look at the question in a large group with limited time resources. I'd like to see a VR version with eye tracking for better real-world fidelity.

I remember reading a Reddit thread a while ago asking women what they would do if they became men for a day, and all the top answers were variants of "I'd walk around the neighborhood alone at night" and "I'd get on a crowded bus/train because I wouldn't be scared of getting groped". It was eye opening to see how mundane stuff I take for granted isn't quite so for half of the world.

This likely depends from the place tho. Because for example where I live, women brave public transport often, frequently and normally. They would look at you as having second head if you suggested they are scared of being in a train.

Some places are more dangerous, others are safe. And also, some families raise girls to be afraid even if the place they live at is actually safe.

That and it probably also depends on the place where the question is asked, in this case reddit.

Also ask myself if people interpret these finding because they really want to solve a problem or make women more afraid by suggesting they should be.

Curious what the goal of this comment is?

There is this online idea that all women are constantly afraid of normal things all the time everywhere.

I find it overstated amd to be honest frequently insulting. No I am not afraid to use public transportation in my city, generally around Europe or USA or whatever. Yes, I am aware that some other cities are super dangerous. But still, most women I know are not afraid to use public transport.

People who just assume I am not capable to handle myself or I am scared of safe situations are frequently the ones putting unnecessary obstacles between me and what I need or want.

I agree that the framing is bad and can lead to some people assuming that women are incapable or needlessly fearful, but I’d argue being hyper aware of one’s environment doesn’t necessarily equate to being fearful.

For instance, Japan and Korea, both which are considered pretty safe countries, but have had many issues of women getting groped on public transportation. Japan had to launch an anti-groping campaign (anti-Chikan) it had become such a problem. There’s even a whole porn genre of people groping women on public transportation that’s sprung out of it.

This all doesn’t make women necessarily more fearful of doing everyday things (ie millions of Japanese women use public transportation every day without fear). Some women may have just become apathetic to the danger and some maybe generally more wary of their surroundings (to the point where it has become automatic or an afterthought). In either of these cases, none of these women are afraid of stepping out into public.

Humans are very adaptable. The human brain can only take so much fear before it acclimatizes to the danger. Just like any other person, women can move through life without fear of something even if there is cause to fear it.

I understand your push back of the framing, but I fear your framing also underestimates the unique dangers and challenges that women do face in public, sometimes every single day. Even in countries and cities that are considered very safe.

My point being that we can both acknowledge that women still have an entirely different experience navigating public spaces then men do, but that that ALSO doesn’t mean that women are irrationally fearful of being in public; or any less capable of maneuvering through society safely on their own.

This comment is definitely a lot more substantive than the previous. Thank you for sharing your perspective!

A lot of it is education. It sounds ridiculous but men aren't born with an innate idea of things like consent and boundaries, they have to be taught it.

It sounds ridiculous as well but neither are women. It's an interesting question to ask why we would see baseline gender differences in the implementation of these concepts. My back of napkin guess is a combination of women being socialized from a young age toward being accommodating to others and similar behaviors while men are less so, combined with the issues of consent and boundaries being a HUGE topic of conversation within women's spheres and again not so much for men. The latter seems to be shifting which may have an effect on the former in time but it's slow and there is significant pushback.

I agree with that. Unfortunately we just kind of forget how much morality is actually learnt. Once it becomes a social norm we act like it's innate.

Are you so sure that was a legitimate and real comment? I'm not a woman so I can't know the truth personally. But people are very performative on Reddit. They also like narratives of victimization and offense.

If you were to straight believe the woman only subreddit of twoxchromosomes being a woman is a constant hell of abortion, rape, random body aches, abusive partners, and general sexism. If you were to straight believe the Judaism subreddit everyone who is Jewish constantly fears for their life and lives with daily radical antisemitism.

Why is that hard for you to believe? They carefully lock and guard the temples where I live; just 2 days ago, Nazis spent 15 minutes reciting antisemitic slurs at the Evanston City Council meeting. I remember watching a C-SPAN call-in show once, I can't remember why, and like every other call was about the untoward influence of the Jewish people. Antisemitism is a big deal.

You ask why it is hard to believe that "everyone who is Jewish constantly fears for their life and lives with daily radical antisemitism." I can't speak for the poster you're responding to, but I can speak from multiplication of anecdote: neither I nor any American Jew that I am related to (born after, say, 1950) has ever in their life experienced any threat of violence or loss of opportunity due to being Jewish. I want to extend that further to any Jew I know, but I know a lot, and I'm afraid I might forget some edge case. To be clear, I'm talking about the US. That isn't to say it doesn't happen -- I'm well aware of the Pittsburgh shooting, and other acts. But there is no significant history of antisemitic violence in the US (roughly four anti-semitic lynchings during a period that saw 3,500 anti-black lynchings), so if this is arising here, it is arising as a new historical formation. Not---as various billboards or Philip Roth novels would have you believe---as the return of a barely repressed, long-simmering animus.

There is a sense among many that the overall vibe has changed. I can buy that---the nativist and anti-globalist vibe in America, and on this message board, has changed, and Jews may well become the totems for that, as they often have. But numbers are harder to come by. The ADL, which does much of the counting, has been open about the fact that it considers Jewish anti-zionist groups like JVP to be hate groups, and their demonstrations (made up largely of Jews) to be anti-semitic acts.[1]

My point is just that if we're talking about vibes and sense of the discourse, there are many Jews (myself included) who also are deeply suspicious that, as the parent said, "everyone who is Jewish constantly fears for their life and lives with daily radical antisemitism." You asked why they find it hard to believe. As an n of 1, closely connected to an n of many more, I find it impossible to believe.

[1] https://twitter.com/JGreenblattADL/status/171479177486948797...

I live in an extraordinarily liberal, extraordinarily inclusive, extraordinarily communitarian enclave of Chicagoland, and I just watched a school board meeting (I am in the kind of community where everyone watches the school board meeting) where 6 households back to back got up to the public comment podium and talked about the specific, materially important physical safety issues they are currently, personally, experiencing as Jewish Americans.

I am not sticking up for ADL, which I agree has tilted way too far towards the defense of the Israeli government and surrendered some credibility in the process. JVP is controversial for good reason, and it is not reasonable for people to cite JVP as evidence that mainstream Jewish Americans broadly agree with a maximalist anti-Israel position. But they are not a hate group.

Right now I look at ADL the same way I look at RationalWiki. I don't trust editorialisms from RationalWiki at all. Who would? But when RationalWiki presents receipts, I look at the receipts. ADL's "editorial" voice is not very useful right now, but their specific reporting often is.

At any rate, my major point here is: Jewish Americans face unique, widespread, material safety issues. If you're operating under the impression that it's easy to be Jewish in America as it is to be Irish Catholic, do some reading and revise that opinion. From what I can see, that would be a very difficult claim to defend.

I admit to bristling a bit at your suggestion that I "do some reading" on the Jewish experience in America. I like to think that I'm fairly well read on the topic. But if it wasn't clear from the previous post, I am also a (secular) Jew, married to a Jew, and come from a large, geographically spread out (and politically spread out) Jewish family. Most of my relatives are married to Jews. I've been to more family bar and bar mitzvahs than I can count, including my own. My name (and, to some extent, phenotype) leave little doubt of my background to those who might care to know. Like you, the places and I have lived and the professional environments I have worked in have brought me in contact with many more. Perhaps unlike you, shared cultural background also offers the possibility of pretty frank discussion on matters related to Jewish experience.

So while I certainly don't presume to speak for all American Jews, or most American Jews, I am operating under much more than "impressions" or "opinions." Like your neighbors, I am describing what I, and many, many besides me, are, as you say, "currently, personally, experiencing as Jewish Americans."

The point you were supporting claimed that this was an experience that "everyone who is Jewish" faced. This is a gross overstatement, and one that is without doubt being mobilized currently for political purposes. If you want to speak about a rise in antisemitic acts in the US, we could do that, provided we are operating under a shared definition. If you want to talk about the experience of suburban Jews in the Northern Midwest, I'd be happy to hear more, and compare it to what I've heard from friends and family who live there. But I was responding to your post about why anyone would question a universalizing claim about the experience of Jews in America. Please don't tell me I need to do more reading to do that.

Fair enough. I regret the word choice.

What more do you want to hear about what's going on in Chicagoland? I'm happy to go into more detail.

Here in today's Atlantic is an example of what I'm talking about, though it's been nowhere nearly that bad here (for instance, thus far, there haven't been whole-classroom walkouts at OPRF --- though we do have teachers signing off on student groups making t-shirts celebrating October 7).

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti...

I appreciate your perspective on this. Thank you and well said.

In the US this would be true in many, many areas. It’s not true in some countries, even in some that could be classified as patriarchal, such as Japan.

Violence against women is very much a thing in Japan too. Heck, they invented the women-only train car to address the safety issue. I don’t know where you’re getting that idea from.

Looking at large countries, Japan has one of the lowest incidence of rape against females --compare it to North America, South America, Australia and Africa. There is no comparison. In Europe, Sweden and France are outliers with a very high incidence. In the Middle East, there are countries with low rates.

Lowest incidents of reported rape against women/girls does not mean the numbers are actually low. Japan has a lot of issues with police not doing their job on these cases, and a lot of social blowback from reporting (e.g. if it got in the news, the woman could lose her job with no recourse, or be expelled from school).

> Looking at large countries, Japan has one of the lowest incidence of rape against females...

And that's good! Really, really good! But it's not everything. Now ask about incidents of women getting groped on trains in Japan.

Trains aren't streets. Yes, they could work lots and lots on their groping culture. But the point is women in Japan feel safe walking at night on the streets, unlike many, many places in the US.

Japan has women-only train cars[1] due to the prevalence of groping and other forms of sexual assault on their transit systems

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women-only_passenger_car

Yes, true... but what is the rate of rape in Japan compared to the US/Sweden/South Africa?

Women walk alone at night in Japan. They feel safer than women in America.

> asked them to click on areas in the photo that caught their attention

I was disappointed it didn't use eye tracking instead. Maybe the clicking method is more accurate than I think though.

It's sweet you are willing to be so generous, but I think you are just being optimistic about how bad the state of external validity in social science research is.

Not a very convincing study

I think a lot of men don't realize that for most women, the feeling of walking around alone in a normal place is equivalent to a man walking around in a very sketchy neighborhood. Almost any man can overpower a woman and, if he really wanted to, kill her with his bare hands. But if a man wants to attack another man, his chance of success is only as good if he has a weapon of some kind.

It is for this reason that I encourage women to carry weapons and train with them. Even if it's just pepper spray, it's better than nothing. And like a fire extinguisher or a tourniquet, it only has to come in handy once to be worth all the trouble of keeping it around.

Furthermore, self-defense classes will pay off even if never directly used. Knowing you are better able to defend yourself is a great confidence boost and balm for anxiety - it lets you carry yourself differently (emotionally and physically), which decreases your chances of being seen as a target.

I think any man born before about 1990 could tell you that. The lack of understanding comes from the attempts to teach children that men and women are exactly the same. That well intentioned approach has left a couple of generations very confused about some very basic truths like this.

> Each participant looked at 16 images and were told to imagine themselves walking through those areas.

Jesus Christ.

I'm not sure what that tells us, but not much.

If the labels on the heatmaps were reversed, I wonder if I would have updated the other direction at all the issue.

Tldr: They tracked where people looked when walking at night. Women look more at the periphery, men stay more focused on the center of their vision.

Then there's some PC non-sequitur about how it's sad the world is so dangerous for women.

Ah, yes, Brigham Young University, notorious for their PCness.

> Students attending BYU agree to follow an honor code, which mandates behavior in line with teachings of the church, such as academic honesty, adherence to dress and grooming standards, abstinence from extramarital sex, from same-sex romantic behavior, and from the consumption of alcohol and other drugs. Undergraduate students are also required to complete curriculum in LDS religious education for graduation regardless of their course of study.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigham_Young_University

It's not a non-sequitur at all. It's a reality backed up by statistics which absolutely explains the observed data in this study.

They didn't track where people looked. They tracked where people clicked - in other words, where they said they looked.

I believe the result, but I don't believe the study.

People clicked on features they thought were more important - ergo where they would normally be spending more time looking had they been physically there. If you have an issue with this study, how do you propose to test their hypothesis ?

Use eye-tracking instead. Gets closer to what people do, rather than what they claim they do.

You know that thing where >95% of people claim to be above-average drivers? I'd like to rule that out.

Once again, because I think my comment will be misconstrued if I don't attach a disclaimer: I believe the result, but I don't believe the study.

This is a rough take. Not every study has to be fully ecologically valid to show us something interesting about human behavior. The authors have presented you with a real, observed difference. What is your interpretation of that difference? Why do you think there is a difference? These people were ostensibly not told that the study was explicitly investigating gender differences, so why is there one?

The male BYU students in the study are performing masculinity. They're claiming to look straight ahead, turning neither to the right nor to the left, because they think that's what Real Men do.

(This is a dumb hypothesis. But there's nothing in the study that allows us to refute it. I'm just saying the study could be improved).

That's certainly a potential follow up hypothesis. Surely this study can be improved, but conversely not every study has to answer every question or be perfectly ecologically valid before it is worthy of publication. For all its faults, the scope of these results is clear, and worth discussing. The authors have a hypothesis - women visually assess scenes differently to men when in the context of walking through them - and have chosen an operationalization that, while not literally strapping an eye tracker to someone while they walk through campus, is a reasonable proxy for it within the time, budget, and technology constraints of the research group. This effort has produced a clear result. Future studies can now be developed that improve the design methodologically and ecologically and dig into alternatives and further nuances.

I just learned a new term (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_validity). Cool.

I know from UX studies that eye-tracking gives a completely different heat map than click-tracking on the same web page and task (because one's measuring how you scan a page and the other's measuring what you click on after scanning the page). This is previous experience that makes me super wary of click-tracking being used to measure scanning behaviour. To me it's akin to saying "we measured the color of the solution with a thermometer", it's just the wrong tool for the job. That's why I don't think it's a reasonable proxy.

I think "future studies can now be developed" is exactly what I'm hoping for.

Your suggestion is fully valid without needing the strawman you mention second.

So the proposition is to use images with eye-tracking? Or video?

Edit: In response to the disclaimer, I am trying to develop your idea for improving the study because I agree it could control for more variables.

Video would seem to be an improvement over still images.

If we're fleshing it out, I think a wider array of college students (BYU may have its own issues) and adding some "neutral" spaces to the test might yield more information. (Although if being "wary" is habitual, the behaviour would probably still show up in neutral spaces?)

Flagged? Wow.

Though the headline is sadly correct, the article is about a study that is random crap that doesn't speak to the well-known issue.

That’s not what flagging something is for— it’s for posts that break the site guidelines— and that’s why the flag has been manually removed.

Headlines get changed to things that actually reflect the link's content all the time. Is flagging not a way for users to try to get that done? (I would have guessed so, but I honestly don't know. I certainly didn't flag this post.)

Flagging is commonly used to de-rank articles people disagree with, and considering the initial comments in the article, I’d eat my hat if people flagged it in good faith based on the headline alone.

Hard truth? Obviously women need to be more careful when walking alone at night; they're less able to defend themselves than men due to obvious physical differences.

This "hard truth" has been obvious and logical to mankind since the beginning.

If you go by statistics on public sphere violence it's really men who should be more on the lookout.

Because men get into fights with each other, and we're wired to protect our women.

If you go by statistics on abductions and abuse, it's really women who should be more on the lookout.

Men are less worried about some guy jumping out of a bush at night. Just fight him and move on; women can't fight back the same.

Or theoretically possible: the risks are equally big for both genders but men tend to be on the lookout less so end up in trouble for often.

How is it even controversial that women are more at risk walking alone at night? This is ridiculous.

What you say has some truth to it, but it is incomplete.

Consider the following: a weak man has less to be afraid of than a very fit woman, even when she is clearly stronger than him.

Agree

A non-trivial percentage of women are physically larger and stronger than a non-trivial percentage of men, yet those smaller men are not scared to walk alone at night for fear of running across a large woman.

The real hard truth is that some men assault women. The problem is that the assaulters look like every other man, meaning women can't target their fears at just the bad men.

> A non-trivial percentage of women are physically larger and stronger than a non-trivial percentage of men, yet those smaller men are not scared to walk alone at night for fear of running across a large woman.

This is just not true. Larger yes, but the percentage of women who are stronger than even a weak man is vanishingly small.

I'm on the lowest percentile of height, and I fear NO woman. I don't have big muscles, I just know there's a difference not only in raw strength, but in animosity and aggression during a fight.

You think small men are afraid at night of a large woman jumping at them? That's a joke.

The percentage of women that are physically stronger than men is extremely small. Negligibly small.

But also true, men are more violent.

For reference, if you take upper body strength as an indicator for this you see the small amount of overlap between the distributions:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Upper-body-isometric-str...

That overlap is the "death by snu-snu" zone and honestly most of those small men would be more than happy for those women to be physical with them

A small % of strongest women are as strong as the weakest "men".

Yes correct, I like to show these kind of graphs because a lot of people (not saying you) do no realize how little overlap there is between the distributions.

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