Question: Why do women live longer than men??

Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 12 Nov 2018:

I recently read a book called Inferior, about the differences between men and women:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31869108-inferior
Apparently it’s not fully understood why women live longer than men. Men and women are very similar in many ways (particularly in terms of mental function: there’s no measurable difference in e.g. mathematical ability) but there are some important differences in the body.

There’s a difference between the male and female immune system: women have to be able to turn theirs on and off when they are pregnant, otherwise they would reject their foetus. So some people think that this might explain why women are less susceptible to disease. It’s interesting to note that you can see this difference in mortality even in babies.

It’s very difficult to do a good study of this sort of thing: some people will die because of accidents or illnesses due to e.g smoking, and must be excluded from the data in a systematic way. Physics (my area) is often much easier since we can control our experiments better.