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The story
On the German-language Lemmy community c/dach, a debate broke out over an article from German public broadcaster tagesschau.de asking whether men are at a health disadvantage compared to women. Some argued that early deaths mostly come down to “dumb behavior” like accidents, while others pointed to an evolutionary explanation for why slightly more boys are born in the first place. Meanwhile, comparative studies of monks and nuns suggested the biological lifespan gap between the sexes is minimal. Others pushed back, arguing that medical knowledge itself defaults to male patients as the baseline, putting women at the real disadvantage in healthcare — splitting the thread over “who’s actually worse off.”
Are men worse off than women when it comes to health?
Source: tagesschau.de / Read the original article here
What people said
But if that's really true, why is it? That's what I want to know. Maybe dumb gender-role expectations have something to do with it — and is there anything society could actually do about it?
That's my understanding too, and the stats back it up. Early deaths from "accidents" in young men are what drags down the male life expectancy. That's probably why evolution rigged it so slightly more boys are born than girls — to even out the sex ratio by the time they hit reproductive age.
Like wars and stuff?
I'd hope that gets excluded from the numbers.
Biologically though, there's barely any difference. The so-called "monastery studies" (comparing monks and nuns living nearly identical lifestyles) proved that.
Well, this comment might not be 100% on the nose, but it's something the article barely touched on, so I wanted to flag this imbalance again.
Granted, I banged it out pretty hastily, but eh, whatever.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
This debate taps into the well-known health gender paradox: “women get sick, men die.” Statistically, women live longer on average but suffer higher rates of chronic illness and more frequent doctor visits, while men face disproportionately high mortality from accidents and suicide in their younger years, which drags down their average lifespan. The “monastery studies” mentioned in the thread refer to research comparing monks and nuns living under nearly identical conditions, used to test how much of the lifespan gap is actually biological. The mention of the income gap, meanwhile, is really a separate issue from the health-disparity debate — and it’s easy for readers to miss that the conclusion flips entirely depending on whether “disadvantage” is measured by death rate, illness rate, or economic burden.
*This article is adapted from a thread on the overseas forum Lemmy c/dach, “Sind Männer gesundheitlich schlechter dran als Frauen?” (German: “Are men worse off health-wise than women?”), freely translated into Japanese by our editorial team. Our site takes responsibility for the translation.
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