“Moms of boys got it right to within 1 degree,” Begley explained, but “moms of girls underestimated what their daughters could do by 9 degrees, even though there are no differences in the motor skills of infant boys and girls.” (emphasis added) In a 2009 Newsweek article, Sharon Begley wrote about a study in which mothers were asked to estimate how steep a slope their 11-month-olds could crawl down. Could our beliefs be causing us to make girls smaller, slower, and less powerful? but absent from most discussions is the possibility that a social construct like, I don’t know, maybe patriarchy is playing a role. We’ve all heard the immutable biological factors - skeletal structure, testosterone, lung capacity, etc. This got me thinking about the carved-in-stone “reality” that the vast majority of men are supposedly bigger, faster, and stronger than the vast majority of women. They not only took on the 19,974-foot high Huayna Potosi Mountain in Bolivia but did so while dressed like, um… well, women (read: traditional Aymara clothing). Recently, a group of Aymara women amazed the world by doing something unexpected.
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