Science Finally Proves Women Are More Resilient Than Men

Women are officially stronger than men, according to science. When the colds wind blow, when the rain falls, when drought ravages the countryside, one group of people comes out the other side: the ladies. No matter what gets thrown at them, they push through. This may be something a woman reading this has anecdotally experienced, but it’s one thing to know in you’re heart that you’re stronger than a man, quite another to have it validated by research.

According to James Vaupel at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense and a team of researchers, women are statistically more likely to survive times of crises. That includes “famine, epidemics or enslavement,” reports Nature.com. They came to these conclusions by measuring things like population and life expectancy and came to the conclusion that women are survivors.

It’s important to note that researchers defined men and women as people with X and Y chromosome or a double X, meaning they’re largely defining “women” by speaking about cis ladies, which is gender essentialist and focuses pretty hard on the binary. There are lots of people who don’t fall as neatly into those categories. But during the eras from where a lot of their data is gleaned, there wasn’t much of a census taken on transgender or intersex people.

It’s hard to know how those considerations would skew their findings, but whatever your gender identity, having a double X chromosome sets you up to be stronger. It’s basically a natural defense against harmful mutations.

Virginia Zarulli from the University of Southern Denmark’s Institute of Public Health explained to Global Citizen, “In simple words, it is easy to see that if by chance a bad mutation takes place on the X chromosome, women have another X that can partly – or totally – compensate for it, while men don’t have this possibility.”

The XX is power!

Also, bodies that produce estrogen have more of a guard against disease, but testosterone increases risk of fatal conditions, the Guardian reports. Apparently, people with a lot of testosterone in their system are more likely to do bone headed, dangerous things. Shocking.

That’s probably why right now there is a global life expectancy average of about 72 for women and only 68 for men. Ladies are hardier at the end of their lives and at the beginning; even female infants have lower mortality rates. From the cradle to the grave, we just keep on running laps around these bros—and all they can do in response is get swole.