Women have long been considered the weaker sex, but that narrow way of defining strength based on muscle mass misses one BIG thing: Among people over 100 years old, 85% are women.
In general, women live about 5% longer than men. There are many debates about the factors that explain this.
For starters, more boys are conceived than girls, but more of them die in utero. In the long run, a girl born on the same day as a boy has a greater chance of living to be 100 than the boy.
This section of Live To Be 120 and Healthy is devoted to the exploration of how gender plays a role in longevity. For women, the implications are that they should capitalize on the factors that contribute to their longer lives, but certainly they will want to encourage their men to minimize factors that contribute to their higher mortality rate (whenever possible).
When all of us – males and females – get to be centenarians, we want the older years to be less about getting sicker and more about the older you get, the healthier you’ve been. Women should have a strong desire to help men identify ways by which they can extend their projected lifespan so that the journey is made together.
In future posts, I will look at such things as chromosomes as gender factors in longevity, the internalization of stress in males vs. females, the delay of cardiovascular disease in women, social and lifestyle factors related to gender, the estrogen vs. testosterone connection, and much more.
