Many wire services and newspapers picked up on a study by researchers at the US National Institute of Child Health and Development that claim men are significantly better at throwing small round objects than women. Here’s the short version: this is one of those studies that is so lacking in any redeeming qualities, that it’s almost certainly an attempt to avoid unemployment by those responsible for it.
First, the researchers tested a grand total of 25 human volunteers and 17 capuchin monkeys. Twenty-five people is simply not enough to establish much of anything meaningful. Sometimes medical researchers have to do very small such studies to make sure a new drug is basically safe before doing real safety and efficacy studies, but there are good ethical and monetary reasons for that. Given the number of women and men who play sports that involve throwing small objects, surely it would have been relatively easy and cheap to do a study on a march larger sample.
Second, the results aren’t all that statistically compelling. The researchers found that throwing balls or stones into a buck at 9 feet and 18 feet away, men were, on average, 32 percent more accurate than women. Given the small size of the sample, that is essentially the same thing as saying there was no difference at all. I don’t want to go into a statistics lesson, but typically to say there were a real effect not only would a larger sample be needed, but the difference in effect should be at least 100 percent or more to avoid the very real possibility that the alleged difference is just a statistical artifact.
The researchers offered two reasons as to why men might throw better than women — that men are more likely to be trained to throw balls or that there is some neurological difference. A more likely explanation is that given the study’s small sample and very low difference, the real cause of the difference is the study design rather than any inherent ability to throw more accurately by either men or women.
Source:
Women ‘cannot throw’. Robert Uhlig, The Telegraph, October 12, 2000.