How important is testosterone for woman for hypertrophy?

There are a lot of misconceptions about strength training for women. Even to suggest women train differently than their male counterparts.

Although men start out with more muscle mass than woman, and higher absolute strength, long term relative increases in strength and hypertrophy are very similar for men and women when we compare similar conditions. Some evidence suggests that women build more muscle than men over a training career, relative to their starting point, particularly in the upper body (Nuckols, 2018).

"But men have more testosterone, right?" Perhaps, but the role of testosterone in the muscle building process, within natural levels, is typically overstated. Higher testosterone level may increase your "base" level of muscle, but to my understanding, doesn't have so much of an effect as people think on building new muscle tissue.

There are also a ton of other factors that influence strength and hypertrophy, beyond sex, including genetics, race, adiposity, training history, nutrition, social factors, etc, and these differences may rival or exceed the influence of sex (Heymsfield, 2015).

This isn't to say there are NO differences between men and women as it pertains to training, as there likely are. For example, some evidence suggests the female menstrual cycle could impact recovery and performance at the various stages. Additionally, woman may be less acutely fatigable than men and thus may be able to perform more reps at a given percentage 1RM than men. Although, I'm not an expert on female biology, so I won't make bold claims here.

In summary, contrary to popular belief, women can gain strength and muscle similar to their male counterparts via ratio to body weight with mirroring conditions. Women don't need a unique training approach and they certainly aren't less capable than men.

I see this all the time with the women past and current that I personally train and have conversation with in person and online as well. Current evidence and society is catching up to par as more and more females (and males) have more access to not only current evidence, but better training protocol. In fact personally, I see slightly higher ratio of young females taking advantage of the information that is available to all of us if we search it out beyond simply reading/viewing and repeating standard memes or IG and TikTok posts of- “Women can lift heavy and not be bulky”...as if the same cannot be true for men. It comes down to the individual and how they respond to training with all factors accounted for.