Across a variety of sports, women are not just catching up after generations of exclusion from athletics — they’re setting the pace. In ultramarathons, women regularly outperform men, especially as distances stretch toward the extreme. Jasmin Paris in 2024 became one of only 20 people ever to finish the brutal 100-mile Barkley Marathons race in under 60 hours — while pumping breast milk.
In long-distance swimming, female athletes now so routinely excel that within the community, their records are just part of the sport. In climbing last year, Barbara “Babsi” Zangerl became the first person, man or woman, ever to “flash” — climb without prior practice and sans falls — the towering Yosemite rock formation El Capitan in under three days.
Generally, discussions of “strength” have meant brute force and speed over short distances — qualities historically associated with male physiology. But stamina, recovery, resilience and adaptability are as essential to athletic performance. And in those areas, female physiology holds real advantages, experts in sports science, human physiology, and biological anthropology have found.
The myth of female fragility is relatively modern. For most of human history, women were hauling gear, tracking prey, and walking eight to 10 miles a day — often while pregnant, menstruating, nursing or carrying children (one estimate found that hunter-gatherer women covered more than 3,000 miles in a child’s first four years of life).
That evolutionary foundation undergirds today’s feats, experts say. “Female bodies have superior fatigue resistance,” says Sophia Nimphius, pro-vice-chancellor of sport at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia.
Four things women’s bodies do exceptionally well
Pain tolerance
A 1981 study put it plainly: “Female athletes had the highest pain tolerance and threshold.”
Immunity
Among mammals, including humans, it is widely accepted that females have stronger immune systems than males. That’s due to the power of estrogen, and also of the XX chromosome carried by women but not men, which provides more variability in immune function.
(There is a downside though; the majority of autoimmune disease patients are female. It’s the cost that women bear for an aggressive immune system.)
Resilience
Women’s bodies seem better built for the long haul — less wear and tear, more staying power, according to the limited research.
Longevity
[W]ith rare exceptions, no matter the species or culture, women live longer. That’s partly behavioral — men tend to take more risks that can kill them — but it’s also biological. Women tend to survive disease, starvation and injury at higher rates than men do. Studies have shown that the Y chromosome, which is unique to men, can degrade over time — a phenomenon known as mosaic loss of Y. This degradation has been linked to a range of health issues in men, including increased risks of heart disease and cancer.