I think it was on BoingBoing (but I could be wrong) that I read about a study of supposedly sex-linked traits that showed that while one sex may be more X than the other using some kind of average, if you pick random members of the population of each sex and compare them one on one, it is so close to a coin flip that as to be functionally indistinguishable. They tested a variety of physical and personality traits.
E.g., we know that men can run faster than women, but if you pick a man and a woman at random the odds of the man winning a footrace are very, very close to 50%.
But as a society I think we tend to look at the extremes - men’s world record sprints are quite a bit faster than women’s - rather than the normal case. The fact that the gold medal women’s sprinter is faster than all but a tiny handful of men doesn’t seem to enter into people’s heads.
