Women are expected to live longer than men.
How much of this is down to physiological aspects and how much is down to the slightly different ways in which either sex (on average) lives?
Or to put it another way, how much longer (or, I suppose, shorter) would I live if I’d been born a woman?
There is at least one study that shows that females are more risk adverse than males even at elementary school age, which contibutes some to women having a longer lifespan expectancy than men.
This is a summary of the study I read, but the whole thing is out on the internet somewhere if you care to search for it.
Huh… I never really considered this, but looking at a pdf from the CDC, it seems that the common figures of life expectancy for males and females include accidents and suicide…
Bolding mine.
I would like to see a figure for life expectancy with accidents and suicide taken out of the picture. It surprises me that that isn’t the case normally, since it would seem to me to be the number everyone is looking for… We all know we can die at any time of an accident.
But it seems relevant that more men than women are killed in accidents, yes? Both because on-the-job accidents from manual labour would affect men more, and because of the more ‘risk-taking’ behaviour which can lead to accidents (in driving, hiking, mountain-climbing and so on).
Why take suicide out of the picture? More men die from suicide than women, how does that not affect average life expectancy?
The question has been debated and discussed endlessly, and it’s impossible to reach any sort of conclusion. It’s just too complicated because the factors are too intertwined.
For example, men are far more likely to die of cancer than women. That might seem simple enough to contribute to physiology. But the fact is that the vast majority of cancers are preventable and the ones that aren’t are usually treatable if caught early enough. So it might seem simple enough to attribute the difference to behaviour. But men are exposed to far more carcinogens than women in their work life, men have less time to seek medical treatment and men are much less likely to live in areas with readily available medical services.
So, is this difference behavioural or physiological? It’s impossible to say. Men are greater risk takers, but by risk taking we don’t; mean driving fast. We mean seemingly innocuous things such as taking outdoor or remote location jobs, taking jobs that involve driving, working and extra 2 hours a day and so forth in order to be more successful. Those are not things that people normally consider risky, but they all carry risks and men are far more likely to do all of those things.
So what you might ask. Doesn’t that just mean that the difference is behavioural? Not really because behaviour can’t be separated form physiology. Men are risk takers in large part because of their brain architecture and hormones. IOW the behaviour is itself due to physiology.
It’s vitally important to remember that because it makes the OP’s question either meaningless or banal. If you were a woman you would have a woman’s physiology and that physiology would cause you to behave differently to the way that you behave now because. As a result of those changes in behaviour you would live on average exactly the same time as the average woman.
Now if we somehow transplanted your brain into an adult woman’s body while maintaining your normal hormone levels then you would behave for the most part as you behave as you behave now. But because we can’t do that it’s been impossible for us to determine what proportion of the lifespan difference is due to intrinsic physiological factors and what proportion is purely behavioural. The two are simply too closely intertwined to allow that.
One of the more interesting attempts to resolve this that I have seen is to try to match the sexes for risk behaviours. So compare men and women accounting for occupation, hours worked, geographic location and so forth. That’s very hard to do because there are very few women engaging lobng-term in most risky occupation related behaviours. For example it’s very hard to find women who have been on the road for 15+ years continuously because most women have children and drop out of that lifestyle when they do so. However those few studies I’ve seen that have tried to do this suggest that women don’t physiologically have a longer lifespan, and many of the studies show a notably shorter female lifespan. However that itself has been called into question by people noting that women competing with men may be stressing themselves physically far more than men are
So as you can see it’s an impossible question to answer, and it probably doesn’t even make any sense as asked.
It seems to me that I read somewhere that womb mortality is quite a bit higher for males than females. It was something like that 40% more males than females are conceived, but at birth there are only about 3% more. Since it is hard to imagine risky behavior in the womb, this would seem to be physiology. By the age of 20 or so, there are about as many males as females (leaving aside places where female fetuscide or infanticide is practiced).
Exactly so. Without debating what is risky behaviour and what is not, the core point is that behaviour is driven by physiology. At some level our entire culture is driven by physiology, and where group differences in underlying physiology exist (male/female being an example), the behaviours of those groups will be different.
Still, if the OP is wondering if a non-smoking, thin man will outlive a morbidly obese smoking woman, the answer is yes, on average.
I doubt that many women would agree.
Don’t most men live more or less in the same areas where most women live? Like in cities and villages and farms? I can think of a few examples where men live apart from women (ships, lumber camps, oil rigs, monasteries, armies, etc.) and where there might, in some (not all) cases be an insufficiency of medical services, but those only account for a tiny minority of worlds males. Most men? No way!
There’s also a theory that it is mostly about average height. Some believe that taller people tend to have shorter lifespans than shorter people, and this may acount for a good part of the difference between male and female lifespans, if not all of it.
Doesn’t matter much who agrees. It’s still true.
I don’t know about most, but nobody ever mentioned most either so it seems rather pointless.
There is a gender discrepancy even in the US, with about 90 men to every woman in major metro areas and about 80 under 30s. Compare that to about 97 men to every woman in rural areas and about 105 under 30s. When you get to pleaces like Australia or China you are looking at two men for every woman in rural areas.
IOW men are much more likely to live in areas without avialable medical services.
Again, nobody said most men.
Secondly if you think that only monasteries and oil rigs lack medical services you ought to visit some towns of <50, 000 people. Many of them lack hospitals, never mind ocology wards. 10 years ago most of them probably didn’t have a CAT scanner. 30 years ago most didn’t have a radiology lab. 50 years ago they didn’t have a radiologist.
You sure don’t have to live on an oild rig to have alack of medical services available.
Did you honestly think that every town had the same medical services available as New York city?
I’ve never actually heard that theory, but it seems to make little sense.
First off men die earlier than women due to a huge range of causes, from accidents to homicides to cancer to diabetes. While there seems to be some correlation between height and circulatory diseases I’ve never heard anyone suggest that tall people are more accident prone, more prone to being shot or more prone to developing cancer. It’s hard to imagine how that could be true. IOW it is concievable that it could account for the deaths attributable to circulatory disease. But the rest?
Secondly if this were true we would expect that men and women would have the same life expectancy when height is controlled for. But this isn’t true. The average Dutch woman doesn’t have the same life expectancy as a Japanese man, nor does a the top height quartile of Dutch women have the same life expectancy as the bottom quartile of Dutch men.
There’s a lot out there about it, e.g. this, to pick the first thing that turned up in a google search.
I don’t think anyone believes there are no differences between men and women other than average height. But it’s still possible that men and women of the same height have the same life expectancy, which would imply men having higher mortality from some causes and women from others.
I don’t think you can compare men and women from different countries against each other (since the same genders show differences between the different countries).
But if the top height quartile of Dutch women are of the same average height as the bottom quartile of Dutch men and still have a greater life expectancy, it would argue strongly against this theory. What’s the source of your assertion?