The notion that a system is oppressive to women is not the notion that men aren’t also sometimes disadvantaged. What’s at issue is whether women are significantly more likely to be disadvantaged than men.
Women tend to feel like a room is colder than men experience it–give a man control of the thermostat and, the data indicates, women will tend to find the temperature he chooses to be cold. And yet most office and public spaces are set to temperatures that men find comfortable. That doesn’t mean there aren’t some men who also find it cold. We’re talking about population level data.
Same applies here. Your anecdotal experience is not evidence that women are not disadvantaged by this system as a population.
I agree Tom. In any statistical analysis there will always be outliers; unusually light riders such as Jimmy and unusually heavy women. But that doesn’t change the fact that women’s’ AVERAGE weight is significantly lower than men’s AVERAGE weight, and so the AVERAGE woman is more disadvantaged than the AVERAGE man. And while I’d be delighted if I could ‘choose a proper cat based on fitness level’ the category enforcement mitigates against this. Hence the problem.
