Are women taking over from men in their dedication to physical fitness? I ask because, since summer came in, I like to go for walks through the Phoenix Park or along the Liffey between Islandbridge and Chapelizod in Dublin in the evenings. I have been struck by the number of people out running, walking, cycling and playing sports. I’ve also been struck by the realisation that most of these physical fitness enthusiasts are women.

Where are the men? Are they at home washing the floors, making the beds and dusting behind the furniture? I doubt it.

Wherever the men may be, the women are out getting (or keeping) themselves fit. Lots of them like to do their exercising in chatty groups but you’ll also see as many women as men running and cycling on their own.

Along the Liffey, rowing is a popular sport and the participants take it seriously. This lot have no interest in messing about in the river; they are training to compete and you will see them gliding along the water most days of the week, morning and evening, in all weathers. It’s a tough, physical sport – and most of the rowers are women.

Again, I ask myself, where are the men?

This growing involvement by women in physical fitness activities is a fascinating development given that, traditionally, women’s sports (with the exception of tennis and athletics) have been rather disdained by the media. It’s almost as though sport is seen as a man’s domain; women need not expect to be taken seriously if they get involved. And yet, if you look around you in the places where people go to exercise, you’ll see that physical fitness is fast becoming a women’s domain in the same way that most of the professions are on the way to becoming women’s domains. We men are definitely lagging behind in the fitness race – and we need to do something about it.

We need to do something about it in the interest of our own health. Shortly before I wrote this article, I came across an astonishing finding from a survey by Cancer Research UK (www.cancerresearchuk.org): men are 60 per cent more likely than women to get cancer and 70 per cent more likely to die from it. It’s a truly shocking figure and we really need to take notice of it.

The researchers suggest these dismal figures might be due, in part, to a failure by men to adopt healthy lifestyles, along with staying away from doctors and ignoring symptoms. One of the lifestlye factors that increases men’s chances of getting cancer is excess weight around the waist. One way to reduce this is to get fit.

This matters now more than ever. The physical work men used to do, and which kept them fit by default, has now vanished or is done by machine – the ride-on lawnmower is a perfect example of this trend.

So if I am right in thinking men are retreating from physical effort while women embrace it, we should stop, think and take our lead from the female of the species: it’s time to get physical.