French demographer Jacques Vallin has long been monitoring longevity in general and sex differences in mortality in particular. He adds to the above an interesting explanation of women's current mortality advantage that could explain the more recent trends: the dramatic increase in excess male mortality emerged as an equally dramatic progress in the general health conditions of our societies was taking place. He thus argues that beyond the negative behavioral or environmental factors that affect men more than they do women, there could be very well be a more fundamental difference in lifestyles that allows women to better benefit from the general progress in health. For example, although women now participate massively in the work force, their roles remain different and their professional activities are, on average, less prejudicial to their health. In addition, women often relate to their bodies, their health and their lives in general in a much different way than men do. To caricature, women seek beauty, men seek strength and power; thus, a woman's body must remain young and healthy as long as possible, whereas a man's body must be submitted to risks and challenges from an early age. The result is that women, much more than men, are attentive to their bodies and their needs and often carry on deeper dialogs more easily with their doctors. Hence, women, being more inclined to take care of their bodies and to prolong their lives, may be better able to glean greater profit from modern medical and social advances by practicing activities that are healthier and better protect their bodies. In this context, women's biological advantage now appears relatively minor in the total mortality differences between the sexes.
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Add Comment"Men dying sooner than women makes sense biologically: because 105 males are born for every 100 females, it would assure that there are about the same number of men and women at reproductive ages." WHAT?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes this study only consider human evolution since humans started agriculture and modern civilizations? What about before that when we were cave people. Isn't it likely that humans were like chimpanzees with a dominate male or two responsible for the majority of the breeding? This would seem the obvious based on us being a dimorphic species. A males reproductive potential is primarily limited by the availability of females.
Perhaps the authors should have started the article with the first sentence of the second paragraph and went forward from that point.
@sparcboy: why do you believe that human mating by pairs only began with agriculture? And that people lived like chimpanzees with a single dominant male breeding with a harem? There are plenty of stone-age per-agriculture peoples in the world, and they DO NOT live like chimpanzees in such a "harem" arrangement. We can safely say that it's been this way for tens of thousands of years, if not hundreds of thousands of years. Mankind has been a tool-making hunter for some 2 million years. Plains hunting requires numbers of males working together, that the "harem" model does not allow for.
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