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Hidden physical powers, why do women live longer than men?
2025-07-12 23:33:24 / JETË
A new book by Starre Vartan, “The Stronger Sex: What Science Tells Us About the Power of the Female Body,” due out July 15, sheds light on the fundamental biological and physiological reasons why women tend to live longer than men, even under extreme conditions. This resilience of the female body has been true historically and remains relevant today.
Female endurance in extreme conditions
Even during terrible times like the Irish potato famine, slavery in Trinidad, and the Icelandic measles epidemics, women have shown a greater ability to survive. Virginia Zarulli, an associate professor of demography at the University of Padua, analyzed survival data from seven historical populations that experienced famine, epidemics, and slavery. Her 2018 study, published in the journal PNAS, found that women lived longer than men at almost all ages and in all countries. Even newborn girls in these settings had a higher survival rate than newborn boys, suggesting that this advantage is deeply rooted in biology.
This essential feminine strength is evident even today, as the mortality rate for men is higher than for women at almost every age, despite the fact that girls in many parts of the world often have access to fewer resources than boys.
Female chromosomes and hormones an immune advantage
One of the main explanations lies in chromosomes and hormones. Individuals with a biological female sex (XX) have two X chromosomes, a significant advantage over the XY chromosome of men. The X chromosome is much larger, containing approximately 10 times more genes, which gives female bodies access to a wider range of immune genes. This makes their defense system extremely robust and diverse. Dr. Sharon Moalem, a neurogeneticist and evolutionary biologist, argues in her book “The Better Half,” that “women have evolved immunologically to outperform men in mutation,” making the female immune system more resilient to constantly mutating viruses and bacteria.
Estrogen, the most abundant hormone in female bodies, also offers a number of immune advantages. As a result, female mammals have more well-equipped immune systems, both in their innate and adaptive responses. Female bodies have higher numbers of active neutrophils (white blood cells that fight infection) and more robust B-cell activity (white blood cells that adapt to fight viruses or bacteria).
Women produce more antibodies targeted to fight infections and retain immunological memory longer, making their bodies more adept at responding to future infections. This leads to “the well-known phenomenon that men tend to be more susceptible to many diseases than women,” according to Marlene Zuk, a professor and evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota. However, the downside of this powerful system is that women are more susceptible to autoimmune diseases and are more likely to live with chronic illnesses after surviving diseases that would have killed male bodies.
The effect of testosterone and the physiology of the small intestine
Testosterone also appears to be an immune disadvantage. Early experiments showed that castrating male animals improved their immunity, while injecting females with testosterone worsened it. This could be explained by the idea that testosterone enables male animals to achieve greater reproductive success by “living hard and dying young.”
In addition to genetic and hormonal factors, the female advantage is also found in the structure of women's bodies themselves. A new study from North Carolina State University, led by microbial ecologists Erin McKenney and forensic anthropologists Amanda Hale, found that women's small intestines were significantly longer than men's. This advantage allows women to extract more nutrients from the same amount of food, a key feature for the additional demands of reproduction and breastfeeding. The discovery supports the "Female Buffering Hypothesis" - the idea that female biology evolved to better cope with environmental and physiological stress.
Implications for healthcare
Recognizing and building on these sex-based differences could transform how we approach healthcare, including cancer treatments and vaccination protocols, making medicine more precise, personalized, and effective, especially for women.
While traditional medical research has long ignored the complexities of the female body, new studies are uncovering the factors behind the strength and resilience of the female body, providing new insights for more targeted treatments for infection and immunity – for all bodies. cnn
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