Women Are Biologically Stronger Than Men And More Likely To Survive
These days there are more sophisticated ways to measure strength than an old-fashioned arm wrestle. Like, for example, our resilience and hardiness when it comes to withstanding horrendous ordeals.
And if research from the University of Southern Denmark is to be believed, women are the far stronger sex in these instances.
Using historic data to analyse death rates for men and women who endured famines, epidemics or were sold into slavery, researchers found that in nearly every case, women outlived male counterparts by years.
The study looked at events in history such as the 1933 Ukraine famine in the Soviet Union, the 1845 Irish potato famine, life expectancy of slaves in Trinidad in 1813; the Swedish famine of 1772-1773, survival rates of freed slaves from the US settling in Liberia between 1820 and 1843 and deadly measles epidemics in Iceland in 1842 and 1882.
In comparing male and female birth and death records they found that females virtually always lived far longer
The Ukraine famine (1932-1933)
For example, during the Irish potato famine life expectancy went from 38 years for both sexes, to 18.7 years for men and 22.4 years for women and in the Ukrainian famine life expectancy dropped from 41.58 to 7.3 years for men, and from 45.93 years for women to 10.9 years.
The study points to the idea that women have a survival advantage which is biologically innate.
"Even in Liberia, the population with the lowest life expectancy, newborn girls were hardier than newborn boys," the study notes.
Their findings, as reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, noted that, "Even though the crises reduced the female survival advantage in life expectancy, women still survived better than men.
"In all populations, they had lower mortality across almost all ages, and, with the exception of one slave population, they lived longer on average than men," they added.
This story originally appeared on Esquire.co.uk.
* Minor edits have been made by the Esquiremag.ph editors.
