Science confirms that women are the stronger sex (sort of)

In another ‘win’ for women in the battle of the sexes, science has confirmed that women are officially the ‘stronger’ sex.

Despite many considering women to be the weaker sex, turns out females actually have a stronger chance of survival than men and it’s not something that occurs with age; in fact women are born this way.

“Pretty much at every age, women seem to survive better than men,” Steven Austad, an international expert on ageing, and chair of the biology department at the University of Alabama told The Guardian.

For almost two decades, he has been studying the well-known fact that women live longer than men. His longevity database reveals that all over the world and throughout history women tend to outlive men by around five or six years, something he puts down to women being more “robust”.

According to research newborn males are statistically at a 10% greater risk of death than females, even if they receive exactly the same level of care. The reasons behind this difference aren’t known, but scientists at the University of Adelaide suggests that a mother’s placenta could behave differently depending on the sex of the baby, which could have an impact on maintaining the pregnancy and increase immunity against infections.

And females inner protection against sickness seems to continue into later life. Austad cites that in 2010, women in the US were less likely to die from 12 of the 15 most common causes of death, including cancer and heart disease, when adjusted for age.

“Once I started investigating, I found that women had resistance to almost all the major causes of death,” said Austad.

The exception was Alzheimer’s disease, to which women are more likely to die from, while likelihood of dying from Parkinson’s or stroke was about the same, no matter the sex.

And it turns out women are more immune to common ailments like colds and coughs too.

“If you look across all the different types of infections, women have a more robust immune response,” Kathryn Sandberg, director of the Centre for the Study of Sex Differences in Health, Ageing and Disease at Georgetown University told The Guardian. “If there’s a really bad infection, they survive better. If it’s about the duration of the infection, women will respond faster.”

Thanks for confirming what us girls knew all along science!

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