Hi,
Women retain their high-frequency hearing much longer than men, often decades longer. My mother's sensitivity to high frequencies was still excellent when she was in her 80s. There are various theories about this. One is that traditionally women stayed at home and weren't exposed to industrial noise and the noise of the city. But that's all changed with a lot of women working. It would be interesting to see a sample of hearing losses of contemporary women who work in industry and in the city.
I'd also agree with kcarlile and others here that women tend to be more sensitive to excessively loud music levels. That may be because they simply don't have the same degree of hearing loss as men.
Generally speaking, men lose the ability to hear 20 kHz by the time they're out of their teens, and most men over 40 or so are unlikely to hear much above 14 kHz.
There's no need to get all worked up about this, however. As someone in this thread pointed out, although 10 kHz to 20 kHz seems like a wide band of frequencies, in musical terms, there's virtually nothing up there, especially above 12 khz. There are a few harmonics of instruments such as violins, piccolo, triangle and cymbals, but the higher order harmonics are way down in level below the fundamental tone and the first few harmonics. It's the fundamental and lower order harmonics that tell your ear and brain the timbre of an instrument. The low-level harmonics up at 15 kHz and above just don't matter, nor do they play any role in the judgments you'll make between what is a good speaker and a bad speaker. What you want is really linear loudspeaker performance in the upper bass, midrange and upper midrange.
Regards,
