Abstract
In countries for which statistics are available, women outlive men by about 6 years. In developing countries the female advantage for survival — the gender gap — is probably less. It was also smaller in advanced countries in the past. For instance, it was only 2 years in the United States in 1920. The question is why women can derive a greater benefit than men from the changed living conditions associated with prosperity. In general terms, the suggested answer is that humanity is now in a transitional state between conditions when the greatest danger to life was starvation, and one in which that is superseded by surfeit and overnutrition. We are only beginning to realize that overabundance also has its hazards — the prosperity-related diseases. Women are better able to cope with overnutrition than men becaused they always had to mobilise stores of nutrients in the body for the purposes of procreation. The means used for mobilisation of such stores provides them with better facilities for the excretion of unwanted nutrients.
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