>> But when a woman is at the absolute peak, she is, at best, only going to be 75% of what a male at his peak is going to be
According to your graph, a peak woman is stronger than what looks to be at least 80% of males.
If you look at women’s world records in track & field a good high school boy could beat them.
If normalized for height and weight, that may well be true. Think about Ms. Rousey...she is probably at the peak of what a woman of her size and weight can probably be. Kind of the Rob Gronkowski or JJ Watt of women, the peak of Everest, so to speak.
If you were to take a distribution of men ranging from the bottom tail to the top tail in strength on some uniform test she probably would rank right at better than 75% of the men you took, if they were the same height and weight.
Remember, though, she is at the end of the top tail of the women’s graph. There are very few like her up there, where there is still a huge population of men...25 times as many men!
The graph isn’t perfect, I don’t think, but all the assumptions I made can be found in accepted medical literature, and I have even seen them on sites that cater to women’s health. But I don’t know things like, is the curve a bell curve or asymmetrical, and if so, what is it shaped like? It might be narrower or broader above or below. I do believe the shape of the woman’s curve might actually be narrower and more asymmetrical just from observation, but that is speculation.
And it could also be true that males, when training hard and extreme, are capable in greater numbers of getting higher in the curve than any women can get no matter how hard they train. I just assume the relative shape of the curves is similar, but it might not be.
But the fact that at the median, women are about 25% less strong when adjusted for size and weight is not contested.
Keep in mind the graph compares women and men OF THE SAME SIZE. The average man is bigger than the average woman.