Turns Out Women Are the Stronger Sex, Says Science

In the latest round of the battle of the sexes, science has confirmed that women are officially the stronger sex.

As it turns out, females actually have a stronger chance of survival than males and it’s not something that occurs with age; women, the findings revealed are born this way.

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

For almost two decades, he Austad 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. It’s something he credits to women being more “robust.”

According to research, newborn males are statistically at a 10 percent 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 U.S. 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, of which women are more likely to die, while the likelihood of dying of 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 Center for the Study of Sex Differences in Health, Aging 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, science, for confirming what girls have known all along!

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• Science Says Smiling Makes You Look Older

• Is Beet Juice the Secret to Staying Young?

• This Face Cream Is the Best Way to Get Baby-Soft Skin

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