Fionwe, I see nothing in Dom's conclusions that outweigh the stated comments in the Companion about strength level to make a gateway. Especially because of the way the Gateway entry was worded in the Companion, specifically naming a MAN just before listing the minimum strength. There are too many nuances to the Power to make a blanket statement such as you insist upon. Starting with the fact that men and women Travel in different ways using different flows. It could be as simple as men don't need to be as strong to Travel.

I agree here ... Flinn was likely given charge of his circle because the others had little/no combat experience, despite having much more experience in the Power than he did. He's also shown that he's got a certain affinity with the Power (i.e. he discovered Healing Stilling). But my point was really about strength of the circles being higher than we previously assumed.

I would say that most of the strength listings in the Companion are probably directly from RJs notes, they mostly read like he was repeating a basic formula for each Aes Sedai he wanted to include ... nearly always including strength, place of birth, year born, year they went to the Tower, years as a Novice, years as an Accepted and the year she achieved the Shawl. There are a few that might be misstated or from an older scale (i.e. Rhavin died prior to the new scale being used so he may have never been "updated" to ++2 or ++3) I suspect Kumira is a typo and meant to be level 44 rather than 24 given that she was described as "barely stronger than Daigian" and as the weakest Aes Sedai, next to Daigian, with Cadsuane's entourage, yet we know that Rosara Medrano (level 32), Shahal Comanli (level 34) and Silvane Redfor (level 33) were all with the group and are clearly weaker than Kumira's stated strength of level 24.

I think most of the time the characters in a given scene are speaking somewhat correctly. However, I don't think any of the male/female strength comparisons are very accurate, based on lack of knowledge ... Egwene is certainly wrong in her estimate that with Romanda and Lelaine the wouldn't match a male Forsaken, and Moiraine would have only been correct in her estimation if, as is likely, Aviendha was well below her eventual strength of 11.

Seems to me that 2 level 17 or 18 women are probably in the range of a match for a ++1 male in terms of raw strength, but without a scale or knowing the difference between levels it's really impossible to say. but this does work if you assume a 72 point scale and about a 3% reduction in strength from each level. I know some of you will think that's insane, but given that level 19 is considered Strong for Aes Sedai and there are only 6 levels of Aes Sedai strength higher (with 20+ Aes Sedai levels below) this seems plausible.

None of this will ever work out perfectly, but you can put a little effort into this and come fairly close

Level 18 would be about a 36 on a 72 point scale, roughly 1/2 a ++1
Level 8 would be about 48 on this scale, which, if Aviendha was roughly Daigian's strength at the time of the quote about matching a Female Forsaken, would make she and Egwene roughly the same as a level 1 ... of course Aviendha was probably a bit stronger than that and it's possible Egwene was still below her potential at this time so maybe they were level 12 and level 35. Or perhaps Moiraine simply believed the Female Forsaken were as strong as the males since she had no real way of knowing how strong they were thus Aviendha could have been more like a level 20 with Egwene at 10-12 and it would still make some sense.