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Notes -
No. When I say men are better than women at X, this can mean two things:
men are better than women at X on average
the share of men who are at least this good at X is higher than the share of women who are at least this good at X
If 1 is true, then 2 is necessarily true as well, but not the other way around. For example, "men are stronger than women" is usually understood to mean 1: if you put a random man and a random woman into an octagon, you should bet on the man winning. This doesn't mean when I tell Raquel Pennington men are stronger than women I am also saying I am stronger than her.
But 2 can also be explained by higher variance: women are "more average" than men at X, so there are more men very good at X and more men very bad at X than women at the same time. If you put a random man and a random woman and have them compete against each other, there's no way to tell who to bet on. But if you want a random man and a random woman to succeed at a task that is harder than average, you should bet on the man.
High enough variance can even counteract being worse at X on average if the threshold is sufficiently high, which might sound counterintuitive: as a completely invented example, men can have worse scores in darts than women countrywide, but the top N darts players can be mostly men at the same time.
What I ultimately wanted to say is that "men are better than women at X" never means "I, a man, am better than you, a woman, at X". At its worst, it can mean, "I, a man, am probably better than you, a woman, at X".
Then why use absolute statements about women if you don't mean to use absolute statements. Saying "men are funnier than women" is saying, in my opinion, "I am funnier than you." Saying "some men are funnier than women" or "most men are funnier than women" seems to be, in my opinion, more aligned with what I see you are trying to communicate.
Because it's a common shorthand when talking about distributions.
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