The strongest women in the JY universe should be Tianshan Tonglao and Li Qiushui, and an honorable mention going to Lin Chaoying. They aren't pushovers, but are not at the top. Apart from them, the rest of the women in the JY universe (ignoring Ah Qing) are generally much weaker than the men. Off the top of my head, I'd estimate perhaps 5 women in the Top 100 JY characters, and the percentage doesn't seem to get better as you increase the number of characters. (i.e. 50 in the Top 1000)

In our inner strength-less reality, the percentages are even worse in most physical competitions and sports. In completely genetic and physical driven events like track and field, young high school boys have shown capable of shattering the fastest records of all time by women. In events like soccer, basketball, football, women can show technical superiority but in the end still be demolished by competent high school males. As the physical event gets more technical and less physical, such as tennis, golf, and even billiards and pool, the men still hold the advantage, but nowhere near in as dominating of a fashion.

It was just an observation I wanted to throw out there, and perhaps discuss the important of physically based genetic traits even in wuxia. Men and women, and men and other men, have different ranges of control for even the smallest of muscles, which can explain why some people cultivate or control their inner power better, and why someone like Xiao Feng could make such ridiculous progress. If we think of inner strength as amplifying your existing muscles, tendons, and bones, and we think of people who are predisposed to be able to build more and control their inner strength better, it becomes easy to see that genetics may play a huge exponential affect on martial arts ability. Not only does someone have more inner strength than you with the some amount of training, they are using it better, and using it on much better things than you. This is all before we consider mental or intellectual superiority.

OT: This post was kind of inspired by reading a couple people talk about Brittney Griner (the NCAA Baylor center) possibly being able to play in the NBA, and a former division 3 male player talking about how him + Baylor second string players demolished the first string Baylor women something like 52-12, and in turn getting demolished like 62-12 when a division 1 male player joined in. Just reminded me of the Greats-Quanzhen masters-rest of wulin dynamic.