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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Sexist or not, I rarely see women shoveling snow. My wife will on occasion (and even less so now that we live in Seattle), but it's almost always been me because, well, I'm better built for it.

But what I didn't hear mentioned is that women have a much lower risk for heart attacks until menopause. And I don't know that I've ever seen a 55 year old woman shoveling snow (again, anecdata). If you strapping young lads were raised right, you'd go down and do it for her since you already have the shovel out. :-)

More so, shoveling snow is amazingly hard work on a level that most people probably rarely experience. I'm a lifelong distance runner with a healthy heart (though weeny little runner arms), and shoveling sure gets my heart going. I can't imagine the strain on a 54 year old guy with a beer gut who spends most of his day sitting. That does sound like a recipe for a heart attack.

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On the other hand, women who do have heart attacks do not do as well, at least partly because people assume they aren't having one.

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-42590013

Probably the same reason that men have lower breast cancer survival rates than women - the common assumption is that it's a gender specific disease, which delays diagnosis and treatment: http://www.breastcancer.org/research-news/20120517

Yeah, I almost typed "immune" before menopause, but that's not entirely accurate. And as you point out, it implies that a pre-menopausal woman having a heart attack just doesn't happen. Hell, my brother-in-law had an nearly fatal heart attack when he was 34 (bad genetics, helped along by too much drinking and smoking). Gender and number of wrinkles are just data points, but not the deciders of who's having a heart attack and who's not when their arm goes numb.

My wife wen't out first to shovel this morning and she's 54 :-).

Anecdata indeed. I've seen women shovel snow all the time

Another data point here. In my general neighborhood who was shoveling mostly depended on who was up or had to go to work first.

I've never seen anyone shovel snow :(

(i.e. anecdotes in this sort of topic aren't useful)

My girlfriend shovels snow, and so does my mother (age 65). Just to add some anecdata :)

'Just to add some anecdata'

Is 2018 the year when anecdata becomes a thing, I wonder?

If we make it so. I had to duckduckgo it to make sure it was correct, but I like it and am adopting it. Seems more efficient to just say "anecdata" than "anecdotal evidence".

Now back OT, I find little microcosm issues like this that show a gender disparity very interesting given the current cultural climate. It shows that in many ways the inequality doesn't exist unidirectionally between male and female in all areas (though it does in some). Physical labor jobs are a great particular example of this.

The real lesson I've learned over the years is appreciation. Men tend to really not understand just how much women do for them or the family (I tried the househusband thing for a bit and learned much of it the hard way), but the reverse is true also, women often really don't understand how much men do for them or the family either. If we all just worked a bit more on saying "thank you" I think the world would be a better place.

With as much as gets thrown around on the Internet, I think it's time to start looking into building anecdata analysis tools and maybe even a big anecdata platform. Anecdata science is going to be a huge field!

Shoveling the next day is also likely to happen in the morning, maybe slightly after. At this time the blood pressure is rising close to its peak or even already peaking. The riskiest time to do hard physical work.

EDIT: why all the downvotes though? Do some people think doing physical work at peak blood pressure is not risky? It's not an anecdata.

So these morning gym workouts are killing us!?

Have you tried weight lifting soon after you wake up vs 2pm in the afternoon? The strength difference is telling.

There were several years where that was basically my routine. Wake up, eat a bit, go to the gym, weightlift, go home.

I’ve been weightlifting for about 12 years though.

No. I already know this is not a good idea but, strangely, I wouldn't have previously applied this obvious logic to shovelling snow?

I live in Maine, and plow snow for a property management company. Women would make great shovelers, but you never seem them doing it. It's probably because you're often called at midnight to meet some other sketchy guys who somehow enjoy shoveling for the next 8 hours without a break.

That's because they are too busy doing pretty much everything else: dinner planning, shopping and cooking, laundry, cleaning the house, looking after and managing kids and working full-time.

It's amazingly hard work in the cold. Which means it takes longer for the unpleasant feeling of sweat to reach the gloriously provider-focused man-brain. So men just keep pushing through. The impulse to push through has probably saved more lives than it has claimed over the centuries, I reckon.

I like that this article came out the same day that the Damore stuff is being rehashed.

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