Sex and gender differences are central to our lives. We all think about them, struggle with them, and seek to better understand them. From Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady who lamented “Why can’t a woman be more like a man”; to Sigmund Freud who wondered “What do women really want?”; to our nursery rhymes which taught us to believe that “Little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice,” while “Little boys are made of snakes and snails and puppy-dogs tails”; to Charles Boyer who proclaimed Vive La Différence!
For more than 40 years I have been conducting research on gender-specific medicine and health-care. At MenAlive we have been helping men and the women who love them to live fully and joyfully at all stages of their lives. Although men and women are alike in many ways, there are also important differences. Understanding these differences can help us all live well.
There are 10 trillion cells in human body and every one of them is sex specific according to research scientist David C. Page, M.D., professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and director of the of the Whitehead Institute. Marianne J. Legato, M.D, author of Eve’s Rib: The New Science of Gender-Specific Medicine says, “Everywhere we look, the two sexes are startlingly and unexpectedly different not only in their internal function but in the way they experience illness.”
It has been said that our genomes are 99% identical from one person to the next. “It turns out that this assertion is correct,” says Dr. Page, “as long as the two individuals being compared are both men. It’s also correct if the two individuals being compared are both women. However, if you compare the genome of a man with the genome of a woman, you’ll find that they are only 98.5% identical. In other words the genetic difference between a man and a woman are 15 times greater than the genetic difference between two men or between two women.”
Even in this era of genetic research, this fundamental difference has been overlooked.
“We’ve had a unisex vision of the human genome,” says Dr. Page. “Men and women are not equal in our genome and men and women are not equal in the face of disease.” According to Dr. Legato and her team at The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine here are conditions that affect males more than females.
- Boy babies are twice as likely to die before birth than girls. Although approximately 240 males are conceived for every 100 girls, the ratio of boys to girls at birth is 1.05 to 1.
- Because of the later maturation in males of the part of the brain that weighs risks and moderates impulsive behavior, adolescent boys are more likely than girls to: Take life-threatening risks,
- Commit suicide and
- Die violently than girls of the same age.
- There are more overweight males than females and males are more likely than females to identify binge eating as normal.
- Men are less likely than women to recover their speech after a stroke.
- Coronary artery disease strikes men almost two decades earlier than it does women; most men with coronary artery disease are dead by the time they are 65. Heart disease presents differently in men and women: men more often feel a crashing pain in their chest; women more often experience fleeting pain in the upper abdomen, shortness of breath, and sweating.
“We need to build a better tool kit for researchers that is XX and XY informed rather than our current gender neutral stance,” says Dr. Page. “We need a tool kit that recognizes the fundamental difference on a cellular, organ, system, and person level between XY and XX. I believe that if we do this, we will arrive at a fundamentally new paradigm for understanding and treating human disease.”
I’d love to hear your input in the comments section below. You can also join me on Twitter @MenAliveNow
How do you equate 15 times greater for a difference of 0.5 % ?
Richard, good catch. There was an error in translation when I copied the paper to the blog. It should say, “It has been said that our genomes are 99.9% identical from one person to the next. So the difference between two men or two women is .1% but between a man and a woman it is 1.5%, a difference of 15 times. Thanks for catching that. Hope that clear it up. We’re still mostly similar, but the differences can make a difference.
It seems to me that the difference could have a lot to do with old brain patterns and roles in the beginning of our development. Neanderthal life expectancy was about 20 according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Males would have been expected to be hunters and survivors taking significant risks for the tribe from an early age, while the girls would have procreated early and been expected to care for the young, breast feeding until they were at least 4. Hence, the earliest programs of habit would have been to accept that taking risks would be natural for males. While females would have been risk adverse to protect the progeny. Today that primitive risk tolerance of males
\] is expressed on the sports field, in alcohol consumption and “fearless behaviour.
Primitive diet would have been raw and biased toward the carnivorous with large amounts of fat, hence our need for a gall bladder. Men would have had the first choice of meat because they were the hunters so their diet habit to eat meat would be a survival mechanism. On top of that the prospect of going for long periods without adequate food would have built in a biological response to store fat.
Hence, I contend that men’s proclivity to take risks, over indulge, carry more fat and die younger is in part due to primitive brain programming that maybe passed on in the gender differences.
Jed, I would love to have figures about the differences in males and females from Europe rather than from the USA. Any chance of finding that?
Patricia, I’m sure there are some variations in specifics between countries. The information I describe here are likely to be true for males and females wherever in the world we live. For more specific information on differences between countries you might check out the site of the International Society on Gender Medicine: http://www.isogem.com/
I am living with a male who is guilty of binge eating. His mindset is that he pays for the food so he is entitled to eat as much as he wants whenever he wants. Nobody can tell him anything because he knows what he is doing and does not want to listen to anyone. How do you tell someone something that they do not want to hear,
Thanks for the provocative (in a good sense) articles. I am committed to Intelligent Design. The differences you identify in your articles have emerged in my non-professional experience in listening and interacting with both male and females for the last 60 years. The source of anger in men is fascinating. As I have thought deeply about the Creation Story in Genesis and the first 10 chapters of the Book. What you identify as anger is classically recorded. Being reconciled to Moral Absolutes out of Brokenness is often a long pilgrimage but is greatly rewarding in personal contentment and in social responsibility. I use your articles and Book, Irritable Male Syndrome, frequently with men in retreats, small groups, and individuals when reconstructing marriages. Good stuff! Write on, and write well. Thanks for identifying this deeply destructive character issue.