To be interested in why women generally live longer than men?

Oh give over.
Why are you getting your knickers in a twist.
In my cohort it's fact - in yours maybe not.
What's embarrassing is your inability to engage without being so rude

Your opinion is completely and totally incorrect. No, most women ALWAYS WORKED FOR MONEY.

Now you know. You're wrong. Read a book, this is utterly embarrassing.

It was just an opinion based on my own relatives and colleagues.
Many women in the 40's, 50's didn't work - they stayed home and are alive and well in their 90's with long dead husbands.
Can you give an opinion without including a put down or is that beyond you?

My brother mashed his lip up age 3, smashed his leg and pelvis age 16, cut the end of his thumb off age 20 and broke his back age 21 (it healed he's not paralysed) he also seems to cut certain car journeys by hours. Despite having in one of the most dangerous careers about I seem a lot less accident prone. There must be something in his Y chromosome.

Unfortunately for this insane theory however, women have absolutely always worked for pay, around their kids, with their kids, leaving their kids at home, prostituting themselves and pretty much any other job they could get for when he left them, whored the money away, drank the money away, gambled the money away or just didn't give it to them.

The tiniest percentage of women in history ever stayed home dependent on a man's wages, because they couldn't.

And of course, being the sex that gets pregnant and does nearly all the nurturing and care giving puts enormous strain on women and takes time off their lives because it is so physically exhausting - as well as them working for money, like they always have.

Not to mention the many, many, many women who never got married at all.

So, this is utter bunkum and you really need to stop relying on Bewitched and American sitcoms for historical facts.

because I've been socialised to know my entire female anatomy is trying to kill me.

This made me laugh.

It’s because men are often not good at looking after themselves or their environment.

DM died a couple of years ago and my DF is pretty useless at keeping up with the household chores and efficient shopping and cooking. He’s getting better but it is obvious that he went straight from living with his mum to his wife.

It's a gift from the universe for having to put up with men all their lives. They get a few peaceful years at the end.

I always thought it was to do with men going out to work and having the stresses that holding down a job and bringing in a wage brings whilst women stayed home doing domestic work.
Funny that the gap is narrowing now women work full time outside the home too

And yet in my experience get far less than their male partners.

I got 7hrs at a push last night. DH just came down after 11. And I couldn't have stayed in bed if you paid me, too much to do, mental list whirring in my head.

I also do far more physical work than DH. I do all household tasks, lawn mowing, sometimes hedge trimming. Don't the vast majority of women do more physical work?

Surely they are going to 'wear out' as a result of that?!

I think a lot comes from the protective effect of oestrogen on the body pre menopause

Do we socialise girls to be more ... Socialised? Is this a field where women have an advantage?

Well, you only have to look at the threads complaining that the (female) OP is expected to write the Christmas cards, organise family get-togethers, deal with her MIL over some issue (instead of her husband dealing with it), care for their parents... Yes, women are often the go-to for socialising and/or social care.

All the childfree women that have been or still are in my life are very valuable members of their families and society at large. The world would not function without them, whether that was my great grand aunt (born 1879) who taught my cousin and I how to paint in her 90s, my great aunt who taught me how to ride a pony, my teachers at school, my DSis and SIL who are my kids favourite aunties, my work colleague who regularly hosts large Christmas dinners for the waifs and strays who don't have families close by and is currently helping my DD get some experience handling horses.

ETA: I think the things that childfree women do for their families and friends overlap with the thing post menopausal grandmothers do and show why women who are not childbearing are so valuable to society.

Surely all the brains that compile these statistics look at cause of death? Surely cause of death would provide many answers?

Nope Aunties and Great Aunties were made for a reason 😘

Whats not a natural thing is for a family only to have one or two children, larger families are more natural and at least some of them would have gone on to have children themselves hence Aunites would definitely have been a role.

So older women without children are useless then. Good to know.

Given baby girls are stronger than baby boys it can't be anything to do with environmental factors. Including working life, men being more daring, or loneliness it must be a biological factor.

Women's immune system can lower itself to avoid attacking unborn babies. Which might also be part of women suffering more autoimmune illnesses

Could their also be something in women generally prefer partners a couple of years older. So they as a couple will die at a similar point in time?

Hold on! I think I've just worked it out. Elderly women help with child rearing their grandchildren so they're more likely to survive and then go on to have children themselves.

How would that work though as they're elderly so we'll past child bearing?

I think it's the caring/nurturing/running around after everyone else that does it. At our local community hub, the women are making the tea, serving the meals, washing up, and the men are sitting there letting them. It was giving me the rage, then I realised the slightly martyred housewives of our mother's generation lived so much longer than the men who retired and sat there thinking they'd done their bit bringing the money in. All the social connections, volunteering and literally running round after other people might actually pay off in your 70s and 80s.

Previously men were more likely than women to work FT, to work for longer, they didn't have breaks to bring up Dc.

Once that evens out with respect to women, the life expectancy will be more or less the same.

I'd agree with that.
There seems to be more social outlets for women who have been widowed.
The 'men's shed' movement is relatively new and still trying to become established. The outlets for men seem to be bowls or golf which both require and element of fitness or the pub but theres less local pubs than their was even 20 years ago

Widowed women are more likely to be involved in charity shops and churches (or other religious establishments)

Women are far more likely to live to an age where dementia is prevalent that’s why. T

We live longer because in the ancient prehistoric past there was some kind of fertility advantage that came with the genes that caused menopause. But note that these aren’t genes associated with early menopause but those with late menopause which makes sense. Women who are more fertile overall do tend to experience later menopause and do live longer. So the ‘grandmother hypothesis’ is probably a correlation to that - ie that prehistoric grandmothers were from a very small subset of women who experienced later menopause and (possibly) extended fertility.

We already know that some disorders we consider as damaging now like PCOS gave prehistoric humans a fertility advantage in deserts and areas with lots of famines (the difference of a few kg probably but significant) & it causes later menopause and extended fertility too. So it’s possible there was some gene that came with menopause (specifically late menopause) that allowed us to live longer.