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Why Women Live Longer Than Men
If
you
could
take
an
immense
group
snapshot
of
everyone
in
the
United
States
today,
it
would
contain
six
million
more
females
than
males.
In
this
country,
women
outlast
men by about seven
years. Throughout the modern world, cultures are
different,
diets are different, ways of
life and causes of death are different, but one
thing
is the same -- women outlive men.
It starts
before birth. At conception, male fetuses
outnumber female by about
110 to 100;
at birth the ratio has already fallen to about 105
boys to every 100
girls. By age 30,
there are only enough men left to match the number
of women.
Then women start building a
lead. Beyond age 80, there are nearly twice as
many
women as men.
epidemiologist
at the University of California at San Diego,
kills
more
men.
She
rattles
off
one
melancholy
fate
after
another
-
heart
disease,
lung cancer, homicide, cirrhosis of the
liver and pneumonia. Each kills men at
roughly twice the rate it does women.
A century ago
American men outnumbered and outlived the
women. But in the 20th
century,women began living longer,
primarily because pregnancy and children had
become less dangerous. The gap grew
steadily. In 1946, for the first time ever
in the United States, females
outnumbered males.
Part of the reason are self-inflicted.
Men smoke more than women, drink more
and take more life-threatening chances.
Men are murdered (usually by other men)
three times as often as women commit
suicide at a higher rate and have
more
than
twice
as
many
fatal
car
accidents
as
women
do.
Men
are
likely
to
be
involved
in
alcohol-related fatalities. Men drivers!
But
behavior
doesn't
explain
away
the
longevity
gap.
Nor
is
stress
the
answer.
In
the 1950s, as heart disease claimed more and more
male victims, pressure in
the corporate
boardroom was blamed. Let women venture out of the
home and into
the line of fire, doctors
said, and they would begin duingat the same rate
as men.
But a funny thing happened on
the way to the funeral. Between 1950 and 1985, the
percentage of employed women in the
United Stated nearly doubled. Those working
women, several studies have found, are
as healthy as women a home.
Today, some scientists
studying the gender gap believe that the data
point
to one conclusion: Mother Nature
may be partial to women.
Every living thing is assembled
according to instructions on its chromosomes,
and humans have 23 pair of them. But in
males, one of these is a vulnerable non-