Are women really stronger than men? | Angela Saini | World news ... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/11/the-weaker-sex-s...

The weaker sex? Science that shows women

are stronger than men
When it comes to longevity, surviving illness and coping with trauma, one gender
comes out on top. Angela Saini meets the scientists working out why

Making a stand: women are better survivors than men. Photograph: Phil Fisk for the Observer

Angela Saini
Sunday 11 June 2017 01.00EDT

F
our years ago, completely spent, blood transfused into me in a frantic eort to
allow me to walk, I lay on a hospital bed having given birth the day before. To the
joy of my family, I had brought them a son. Blue balloons foretold a man in the
making. Not just the apple of my eye, but the one who would one day open jam
jars for me. The hero who would do the DIY and put out the rubbish. He who was born to
be strong because he is male.

But then, physical strength can be dened in dierent ways. What I was yet to learn was
that, beneath our skin, women bubble with a source of power that even science has yet
to fully understand. We are better survivors than men. Whats more, we are born this
way.

Pretty much at every age, women seem to survive better than men, says Steven

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Austad, an international expert on ageing, and chair of the biology department at the
University of Alabama. For almost two decades, he has been studying one of the
best-known yet under-researched facts of human biology: that women live longer than
men. His longevity database shows that all over the world and as far back as records have
been kept, women outlive men by around ve or six years. He describes them as being
more robust.

Robustness, toughness or pure power whatever its called this survival ability cracks
apart the stereotype. The physically strong woman is almost a myth. We gaze upon great
female athletes as though theyre other-worldly creatures. Greek legend could only
imagine the Amazons, female warriors as powerful as men. They break the laws of
nature. No, we everyday women, we have just half the upper body strength of men. We
are six inches shorter, depending on where we live. We wield power, but its emotional
and intellectual, we tell ourselves. Its not in our bodies.

Not so, says Austad. He is among a small cadre of researchers who believe that women
may hold the key to prolonging life. In extremely old age, the gap between the sexes
becomes a glaring one.

According to a tally maintained by the global Gerontology Research Group, today, 43

people around the world are known to be living past the age of 110. Of these
supercentenarians, 42 are women. Interviews with the worlds current oldest person,
117-year-old Violet Brown, who lives in Jamaica, reveal she enjoys eating sh and
mutton. She once worked as a plantation worker. Her lifestyle betrays few clues as to
how she has lived so long. But one factor we know has helped is being a woman.

Grey power: 42 of the 43 people over the age of 110 are

women. Photograph: Phil Fisk for the Observer

Yet there is bizarrely little research to explain the biology behind this. What scientists do
know is that this edge doesnt emerge in later life. It is there from the moment a girl is
born. When we were there on the neonatal unit and a boy came out, you were taught
that, statistically, the boy is more likely to die, says Joy Lawn, director of the Centre for
Maternal, Adolescent, Reproductive, and Child Health at the London School of Hygiene
and Tropical Medicine. She explains that, globally, a million babies die on the day of
their birth every year.

But if they receive exactly the same level of care, males are statistically at a 10% greater
risk than females. What makes baby girls so robust remains mostly a mystery. Research
published in 2014 by scientists at the University of Adelaide suggests that a mothers
placenta may behave dierently depending on the sex of the baby, doing more to

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maintain the pregnancy and increase immunity against infections. For reasons
unknown, girls may be getting an extra dose of survivability in the womb.

Wherever it comes from, women seem to be shielded against sickness later on.
Cardiovascular disease occurs much earlier in men than women. The age of onset of
hypertension [high blood pressure] also occurs much earlier in men than women. And
theres a sex dierence in the rate of progression of disease, says Kathryn Sandberg,
director of the Centre for the Study of Sex Dierences in Health, Ageing and Disease at
Georgetown University.

Austad found that in the United States in 2010, women died at lower rates than men
from 12 of the 15 most common causes of death, including cancer and heart disease,
when adjusted for age. Of the three exceptions, their likelihood of dying from
Parkinsons or stroke was about the same. And they were more likely than men to die of
Alzheimers disease. Once I started investigating, I found that women had resistance to
almost all the major causes of death, he says.

Age of reason: Violet Brown, centre, the worlds oldest

person, was born in Jamaica in 1900. Photograph: Raymond
Simpson/AP

Even when it comes to everyday coughs and colds, women have the advantage. If you
look across all the dierent types of infections, women have a more robust immune
response, adds Sandberg. If theres a really bad infection, they survive better. If its
about the duration of the infection, women will respond faster. One explanation for this
is hormones. Higher levels of oestrogen and progesterone could be protecting women in
some way, not only by making our immune systems stronger, but also more exible. This
may help maintain a healthy pregnancy. A womans immune system is more active in the
second half of her menstrual cycle, when shes able to conceive.

On the downside, a powerful immune response also makes women more susceptible to
autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. The body is
so good at ghting o infection that it attacks its own cells. And this may explain why
women tend to report more pain and sickness than men. This is one of the penalties of
being a better survivor. You survive, but maybe not quite as intact as you were before,
says Austad. Another factor is simply that men are dying more. Part of the reason there
are more women than men around in ill health is to do with the fact that women have
survived events that would kill men, so the equivalent men are no longer with us, he
adds.

When it comes to biological sex dierence, though, everything isnt always as it seems.

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At least some of the gaps in health and survival may be social, reecting gender
behaviour. Women may be more likely to seek medical help, for instance. Men may have
less healthy diets or do more dangerous work. Nonetheless, Austad and Sandberg are
convinced that nature accounts for a good deal of what we see.

If they are right, this raises a deeper scientic conundrum. Our bodies adapted over
millennia to our environments. So what could it have been in our evolutionary past that
gave the female body a little more of this magical robustness? How and why would one
sex have developed a survival edge over the other?

Studies of hunter-gatherer societies, who live the way we all may have done before xed
settlements and agriculture, provide a few clues. Many anthropologists studying tribal
communities in Africa, South America, Asia and Australia believe early humans lived
fairly equal lives, sharing responsibility for food, shelter and raising children. The
Flintstones model, with wife at home and husband bringing back the bacon, just doesnt
stand up. Instead, the evidence shows that women would have done at least the same
physical work as men, but with the added burden of bearing children.

Theres a general consensus now that hunting-gathering societies, while not perfectly
egalitarian, were less unequal, particularly with regard to gender equality, says Melvin
Konner, professor of anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, who has spent years
doing eldwork with hunter-gatherers in Africa. Because of the scale of the group
dynamics, it would be impossible for men to exclude women.

The more research that is done, the more this is reinforced. Even hunting that
prototypical male activity is being recast as a female one, too. Anthropologist Rebecca
Bliege Bird, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, oers me the example of the
Martu, an aboriginal tribe in Western Australia. When Martu women hunt, one of their
favourite prey are feral cats. Its not a very productive activity, but its a chance for
women to show o their skill acquisition.

Keep on running: Paula Radclie continued to train through

her two pregnancies. Photograph: Getty Images

Indeed, women are known to be particularly good at endurance running, notes Marlene
Zuk, who runs a lab focusing on evolutionary biology at the University of Minnesota. In
her 2013 book Paleofantasy, she writes that womens running abilities decline extremely
slowly into old age. Theyve been known to go long distances even while pregnant. In
2011, for example, Amber Miller ran the Chicago marathon before giving birth seven
hours later. World record holder Paula Radclie has trained through two pregnancies.

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Why, then, are we not all Amazons? Why do we imagine femininity to mean small,
waif-like bodies? The lives of most ordinary women, outside the pages of magazines,
destroy this notion. Visiting Indias cities, I see female construction workers lining the
streets, hauling piles of bricks on their heads to building sites. In Kenya, I meet female
security guards everywhere, patrolling oces and hotels. Out in rural areas, there are
women doing hard physical labour, often hauling their children in slings. Our ancestors
would have done the same.

In evolutionary terms, these were the circumstances under which our bodies were
forged. For an enormous chunk of early human history, as we migrated through Africa to
the rest of the world, women would also have travelled hundreds or thousands of miles,
sometimes under extreme environmental conditions. Just reproducing and surviving in
these conditions, talk about natural selection! Im told by Adrienne Zihlman, an
anthropologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, when I visit her at her home in
San Francisco.

Zihlman has dedicated her career to understanding human anatomy, and in particular
the evolution of womens bodies. Women have to reproduce. That means being
pregnant for nine months. Theyve got to lactate. Theyve got to carry these kids. Theres
something about being a human female that was shaped by evolution. Theres a lot of
mortality along the way that really can account for it.

When I gave birth to my son, I did the most physically demanding thing a human can do.
Yet I am considered the weaker sex. Zihlman reminds me that my body was made strong
by the struggles of countless generations of women who went before. There is
something about the female form, the female psyche, just the whole package, that was
honed over thousands and thousands, even millions, of years to survive, she smiles. I
happen to remember, in that moment, that at home I do all the DIY.

Myths and misses: five more things you didnt know about women and
men
Separate symptoms Women and men present dierent symptoms for the same medical
conditions. Women are more likely to have insomnia and fatigue in the weeks before
they have a heart attack, rather than the chest pain commonly experienced by men.

Changes of life Women in India, Japan and China experience far fewer menopause
symptoms than western women who commonly report hot ushes, night sweats,
depression and insomnia. Scientists at Kings College London argue this could be due to
women lumping together their experience of growing older with the menopause.

Casual sex Women are choosier but not more chaste than men. A study by two German
researchers, Andreas Baranowski and Heiko Hecht, found that women want casual sex
just as much as men and were as likely as males to have sex with a stranger, as long as it
was in a safe environment.

Boys toys A 2010 study by Professor Melissa Hines at the University of Cambridge found
that girls on average were genetically predisposed to prefer dolls while boys liked to play
with mechanical toys such as trains.

Risky business Testosterone is associated with higher levels of optimism, rather than

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aggression. Saliva samples taken from traders on the London Stock Exchange conrmed
they had higher than average testosterone levels. Scientists from Britain, the USA and
Spain concluded this increase made the traders more optimistic so more likely to take
big nancial risks.

Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong and the New Research Thats Rewriting the
Story by Angela Saini is published by Fourth Estate

Main photograph: Acrobats JD and Nikki; Stylist Hope Lawrie; special effects make-up
Julia Bowden

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