I have two questions that have bothered me for a while:
Why do women live longer than men all over the world?
I can understand why women may not be able to compete successfully with men in physical sports, but how does one explain the disparity in a game like chess?
(Judith Polgar for all her success continues to be an aberration)
Women don’t live longer than men all over the world. For example in Afganistan the life expectancies are: 46.62 male 45.10 Female. See:
http://www.os-connect.com/pop/p1.asp?hichpage=3&pagesize=20&sort=Country
But you’re right they generally are. The exceptions generally occur when death due to childbirth is high. In fact, the life expectancy of women used to be less than men for just this reason throughout most of the world.
I’m not sure why it’s higher for women now. I do know in the US many more men die violently and in work related accidents. I suspect more die in automobile accidents as well.
My understanding is that the answer to both your questions is that males tend towards higher risk tolerance than women.
Not only do men tend to excel in things like chess, but they also occupy more on the opposite end of the bell curve; there are more male criminals for example.
Because of this higher risk tolerance, males have a higher death-rate at all ages, from very young to very old.
Of course, this is all general, there are plenty of individual exceptions.
I think we had a thread on the chess question recently, and as I recall the answer was basically that men were more agressive, or perhaps more logical or something like that.
There might be exceptions in countries where a large portion of women die of child-birth early. But, by and large, women live longer in developed and developing countries. It really looks like there is something genetic/gender-based about this. It can’t just be a social phenomenon.
I am not sure if the same argument extends to chess though.
There is undoubtedly a genetic component to the lifespan question. Heart disease is the biggest killer in the western world. Pre-menopausal women are naturally protected form heart disease whereas most men begin developing signs at about 30 if they are prone to the condition. That gives men a 20 year lead on women in terms of progression of a fatal disease. Of course it’s not perfect because the disease progresses faster with age but it is significant. Not only that but the decline in testosterone levels in elderly males promotes heart disease and other conditions which aggravate it. Women don’t have such high testosterone levels so they don’t suffer the effect nearly as badly.
Men also work physically harder than women, and hard work reduces life span. Organs work harder so they wear out faster. Men are also more prone to stress than women and stress is another contributing factor in heart disease as well as many other conditions.
Men are also more prone to suicide than women and far more men than women die in war which is not insignificant this generation.
Couple those factors with the high risk strategies and consequences discussed above and it’s hardly surprising that men have shorter lifespans.
Because they’re not married to other women?
Bizz ducks and runs
Pardon me if I’m exaggerating the truth here, but isn’t it true that womens’ bodies are tougher and their pain thresholds higher, so that childbirth is easier*?
*[sub]Not to imply that it’s easy.[/sub] :smack:
Thanks! 
Simply put no, it’s not true. Or more correctly there’s no reason to believe that it’s true. I suspect you mean pain tolerance rather than threshold, and the pain threshold varies greatly across both genders and there’s no reason to believe that women have higher tolerances than men. Naturally it’s impossible to test in a controlled scientific manner but the little evidence that is available suggests no difference
Women tend to have higher morbidity rates, while men tend to have higher mortality rates.
A very good, plausible reason for this is that women go to the Dr. more often so:
a) problems are caught earlier and are typically more treatable
b) health is more of a priority
c) women complain about things more, so, like a, serious problems are caught earlier.
Anecdotally, most of the men I know pride themselves on never going to the Dr. (this is obviously not true for all men - my dad goes with regularity, but this is because he has chroinc health issues). A fella can have a fungus all over his body, be bleeding out his eyeballs, and have a chronic cough and when promted to visit a physician he’ll say “Bah - I’m sure it’ll clear up soon enough.”
When men get lost on their way to the hospital, they don’t stop to ask for directions.
That’s BS. Hard work never killed anyone. I’ve been reading about some recent centagenarians, and their life histories usually include working hard since children since they were born in poverty. Hard work improves the cardiovascular system. Well, of course, if you don’t build up to it and are not in shape, you can suffer a heart attack shoveling snow. But a lifelong history of hard work improves your chances for a long life. …Or at least it will seem long.
About the chess, IMHO males have a tendency to be better at math while women at English (literature, etc.) There appears to be a high correlation between math and chess and many of the best chess players have been mathameticians. The highest rating men’s player is now Kasparov (2831 FIDE rating), and the highest rating women’s player is now Polgar (2728), a difference of about 100 points. Many more men than women play chess, for whatever reason, and that’s an important factor.
Coincidentally, Chess Life, May 2004, has an article titled “How the Development of the Queen Led to Women not Playing Chess.” It states “combined with other social changes that doomed women to much lower status in the modern world than they had had in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, chess was no longer the game of love, but a masculine struggle for supremacy at the margins of social life. With the narrowing of the definition of what was proper feminine behavior, chess was considered not to be a woman’s affair at all. …[snip] There are many speculations as to why women do not play as well as men, including the usual biological ones, as well as the assertions that it is all a matter of convention. There is the question of whether women want to make the commitment to the game as well - make the sacrifices necessary to be good in a game that hardly pays at all. There are no real answers at this time…”
The bizarre thing is that women live longer even in the non-Western world. The other factors such as work and stress might come into play then.
alice
Women are less likely to go to the doc in many countries that still rank them a notch below menfolk. They are not encouraged to complain about their health and are discouraged from going to the doc.
Even in these third-world nations, women live longer.
Genetics? Men working more?
In countries where women don’t die in childbirth, rendering their life expectancy lower then mens, they get medical care during pregnancy.
In countries where pre-natal care is not provided, the female mortality rate is higher then males. (Or, women die at an average younger age.)
Now that really is BS barbitu8. Moderate exercise will increase lifespan. Hard work will severly descrease lifespan. Humans never evolved to work 16 hours/day digging coal or breaking roocks even when ill. Such activities undertaken for 40 years will lead to death, not an increase in lifespan.
In point of fact archaeologists have difficulties aging many ancient skeletons from the peasantry because age, after about 30, is determined largely by wear on joints and signs of injury. Such wear is so common in non-nobility that it is almost impossible to judge ages. That is further suported by written records which show that nobility, who undertook moderate exercise, invariably outlived peasantry who undertook sustained hard work.
The effect of prolonged hard work on lifespan is most easily seen in animals where comparisions ar ereadily made. Working dog or horse will have a natural lifespan of about 75% that of a non-working animal. And that is natual lifspan, not death due to accident.
I’m genuinely surprised to find that anyone believes that prolonged stress and long work hours is healthy for males. I honestly thought that myth was dispelled by the 1960s. But apparently some people still believe it. Chronic back pian, joint damage, carpal tunnel syndrome, elevated blood pressure and all the other symptoms of prolonged hard work somehow increase lifespan.
Life Insurance Guy joke:
Q: Why do married men die sooner than married women?
A: They want to.
I suppose how “hard” is the work. I just read the other day about a female centegenarian who from an early childhood had to work hard on the farm to help support the family. She wasn’t exactly breaking rocks, but it was hard work. And a few weeks ago, a male centegenarian had a similar history. I didn’t say anything about stress. Of course you have to adjust to stress, and if you don’t you break down, but just as in work, a little stress makes you a better person.
I saw the lifespan question on a TLC show, and they concluded that, from an evolutionary perspective, the grandmother was more important in childrearing than the grandfather, and thus it is advantageous for humans if women live longer.
Then again, it was on TLC, so it’s basically just a WAG.
Regarding chess, I’ve wondered why men are better than women at just about everything competitive. (And cooperative, for that matter.) Last year there was a GQ thread that linked to a study claiming men were slightly more intelligent than women. If that is true, that would explain the chess thing well enough for me.
The real puzzler IMO is: Why are men better at billiards? Because men have a better grasp of spatial relationships? That seems like a reach.
Ha!
That’s no longer true, bizz. Since as of this morning, right there in your location of Boston, Mass., they are doing gay (and lesbian) marriages.
It’s probably a minor effect compared to violence, but testosterone does have a mild immunosuppresive effect - making men more susceptible to infections.
mischievous