Gender Differences in Health

Abstract

A central feature of mortality trends throughout the 20th century is the obvious gender difference in life expectancy: in the United States, women live on average 5.2 years longer than men (National Center for Health Statistics [NCHS], 2006). This gender difference in mortality led many researchers to question the centuries-old assumption that women were the “weaker sex.” Yet, our understanding of the differences and similarities in men's and women's physical and mental health has changed dramatically over the past 20 years. A review of these similarities and differences reveals that researchers were asking the wrong question. The question “which is the weaker sex?” is framed in the language of biological advantage and disadvantage of one sex over the other and implies that biological differences can be summed up to determine which sex is the fittest. At best, this approach produces oversimplified models of the complex patterns of gender differences in health (Bird & Rieker, 1999; Rieker & Bird, 2000, 2005). Although men and women do seem to have some unique biological advantages and disadvantages over each other, substantial variation occurs among women and among men, and these differences seem to vary with certain social conditions. Yet, much of clinical research tends to minimize or ignore the social processes that can influence health differentially and to reify biomedical models that portray men's and women's health disparities as inherently biological.