Not too long ago we were visiting a elderly female relative in an assisted living home. And I noticed in a room full of women, there was only one or two men. I asked a worker there about it, and she said women on average live 10 or 20 years longer than men.
What is it in their physiques that allow women to live so much longer than men?
Thank you in advance to all who reply 
IMHO, in general, men’s stress levels overall cause more chronic health problems that lead to a shorter life span.
It’s been noted that married men live longer than single men. However, married men are more willing to die. 
Well first off you need to understand that any 10-20 year difference is due largely to differences in mortality, not longevity. That might seem odd but quite simply men get killed more often. Between wars, high risk occupations, high risk behaviour, higher risks of violent crime and poorer medical care males from the age of about 5 upwards die at significantly higher rates. Note that none of this means that women actually ‘live longer’ in the sense people normally mean and none of it has anyhting to do with physiology. It just means that men are much less likely to reach old age to ever be in an old folks home because they die young.
Beyond that men are also at much higher risks of diseases of old age such as cancer and most notably heart disease. The heart disease risk is primarily linked to hormonal differences between men and women. The cancer risk is harder to pin down. Smoe of it is because men are far more likely to be engaged in occupations which incraese cancer risks such as work in the sun, work with synthetic chemicals and so forth. Some of it is because men take less care of their health, particularly in terms of getting medicla care, checkups and so forth.
To put it bluntly, male health and saftey lags behind female. Some of that is self inflicted, some of it is purely societal and some of it is genetic and it’s hard to separate the factors out.
One very plausible possibility is that men tend to have higher metabolisms than women. A higher metabolism means that they process food and oxygen in higher quantities and produce more free radicals, which attack the body on a small scale, constantly, leading to faster aging.
Also, testosterone isn’t particularly good for the heart.
What about sociological factors? (This is a question and not an answer to the OP)
I thought I heard the following offered as one reason theat widowers died shortly after their wives: For previous generations women were the home-makers and men rarely had to make their own meals, do their own laundry or shop for basic, healthy groceries. If the woman died first, the men didn’t take care of themselves particularly well. Nutrition went to hell, general cleanliness went to hell, and if they were sick or injured, they figured they’d just suck it up and not bother with a doctor.
Would this be a contributing factor too? Or is it not relevent if you are looking only at nursing home residents that get, one would expect, the same kind of care regardless of gender?
Then again, just because a nursing home facility offers healthy meal doesn’t mean a guy will eat them. My grandfather ate nothing but cookies and pie when he went to a nursing home.
Apparently the gap is shrinking, particularly because of women smoking, but also because women in the work world suffer similar stresses.
That said, I think overall men have been less likely to take care of themselves. Without bosoms and cervixes that might cause trouble that need to be checked regularly, and because they don’t have menstrual troubles or babies, they are probably less motivated to bother with visiting the doctor.
Think of the guys you know and of the women you know. Which is more likely to say they haven’t had a checkup at the doc’s office for many years? How many Jim Hensons try to tough out maladies until it’s too late to treat them?
I think it’s still true that men tend to be less likely to be willing to take on diets that, for instance, cut down on meat and fat. So much of it is probably lifestyle.
There is now evidence that men die sooner because they’re buggier.
Less obvious is the contribution that menstruation might make to longevity
although Jay Leno says women menstruating is why men die sooner.
More vegetarians are women. They get less LDL cholesterol than meat & potatoes hubby.
Hmm, I’m pretty sure the average lifespan of men and women are only off by 7 years.
I think you would also see more women in a home, mostly because there would be more widowed women in there. Couples aren’t likely to go to a home, and if the woman dies, it is more likely the guy would live on his own than vice versa.
Of course this may change as the newer generations get older, but right now, the generation in the homes probably have a lower expectation of women and independence than we do now.
Why would that be? If anything, I’d expect women to be more used to taking care of themselves in their own home.
Yeah, I would too. I might be wrong and I don’t have a cite, just my observations and what I know about the generations before me and their views on women, as well as how those “views” affect how women feel about themselves.
Plus I think women are much more social than men, and a home offers, at least at face value, a place where it is easy to socialize.
This doesn’t seem like it would be a major factor for the generation currently inhabiting nursing homes, although it might be the case for baby boomers on forward. I doubt that many people born in the 1920s or thereabouts have ever been vegetarians, at least in the US.
As for the evolutionary reasons for the biological differences, males of every species (except, presumably, seahorses) tend to take on the riskier jobs (whatever those might happen to be, in that species), because biologically, men are much more expendable. Even if you lose a large percentage of the males in a population, they can still get the same number of females pregnant. So because males tend to take the dangerous jobs, they tend to have adaptations which make them better suited for those jobs. Testosterone will increase physical strength and aggression, which are good things for a hunter, or a soldier. But testosterone also decreases life expectancy. For a male, who’s likely to suffer misadventure before old age anyway, that’s a reasonable evolutionary tradeoff, but for a female, not so much.
I presume this means that you have a cite that indicates that vegetarians live longer than non-vegetarians? As this directly contradicts the 54 years of accumulated epidemiological data I encountered during my time in cancer research, I would be very interested in seeing it.
We must also remember, that in centuries gone by, women might not necessarily have lived longer. In prior generations, there was a much greater risk of dying of childbirth. A year or so ago, I was reading some family history going back to the 1400s in Europe, and there was an incredible recurrence of women marrying, giving birth to 5 children in 6 years (some of whom survived infancy), then dying, to be replaced by another wife shortly thereafter. Lather, rinse, repeat. Very few of the women lived to the age that the menfolk did. Many fewer widows than widowers.
Women may be more used to it, but sometimes they don’t want to. My mom has been , in a weird way that’s hard to describe, looking forward to eventually moving into an assisted living facility ever since she went on a cruise with a bunch of friends. An assissted living facility takes care of a lot of the day-to-day logistics, freeing up a lot of time for fun.
A woman in an assited living facility could maintain her quality of life if she’s still healthy, but doesn’t have to worry about being the stereotypical “frail and vulnerable old lady living alone”. So she’s less inclined to worry about personal safety. She doesn’t have to worry about the pesky maintenance of things that her hubby used to do like mow the lawn and shovel the snow, and she gets to hang out with friends.
My former father-in-law spent the last 10 years of his life eating crappy frozen dinners in front of the TV, and if not for the fact that we took him out, would have spent the entire past decade rotting on the couch smoking cigarettes, with a neglected, overgrown lawn and a fridge full of festering food left over from the mid-1990s. (We hired a cleaning lady to go in twice a week, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have even bothered to take out the garbage more than once a month.) But he insisted on staying put so he could be “independent”, even though his quality of life kind of sucked.
His older sister, on the other hand, went to cultural events with her knitting club friends, had season tickets (discounted for seniors) at a local theater, went to movies on the cheap Tuesday nights, went to every, single outdoor music festival, craft festival, and hot-air balloon festival and parade the town had to offer, and lined up for hours to see the Platters and the Inkspots on a reunion tour. She was in a nursing home that had all sorts of day programs available and field trips to gardens, parks, museums, festivals etc. She didn’t even have to drive to any of the events because they’d bus you. For meals she just went to the cafeteria. The building was secure against “frightening strangers” and if she got sick or injured, there was help nearby at all hours. So she had both security and a lot of freedom from mundane responsibilities.
She could have stayed alone in her own place, but the facility offered a much better quality of life. My former father-in-law wanted independence and got it. He didn’t even bathe unless he knew he had company coming over.
Here are several cites that say you’re wrong. Low testosterone levels in a man are a risk factor for heart disease.
Well, in the 1920s there was Yogananda & co. out in LA.
Are you saying that your findings are the opposite?
According to the American Heart Association, heart disease is the number one killer of women. It’s responsible for half the deaths of women over the age of fifty.