women live longer than men, why?

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“Some of my colleagues at the Department of Sociology in Helsinki wonder whether it is meaningful to study mortality differences. After all, the death rate is the same for everyone: one death per person” (Valkonem 1993)[1]

Henry Allingham (6 June 1896 – 18 July 2009), First World War veteran and, for one month, the verified oldest living man in the world, was an anomaly. Supercentenarians themselves are rare, of course, but male ones are particularly so[2]. However, it is not merely amongst the old and frail where women outlive their male counterparts - in fact, it has been noted as a near universal truth, spanning all ages, locations and recent times that when it comes to life expectancy, women have the upper hand. The reasons for the trend have been extensively explored by physicians, epidemiologists, biologists, demographers, actuaries and laymen - but the opinions of these experts greatly differ. As Nathanson (1984) stated:

“It is the uniquely protean quality of sex as a conceptual category that allows the scholar to see in it that for which his training tells him to look: the ...

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