Where does the tallest men live (in which country?

If women are oppressed in every country of the world, why do they live longer than men?

• Could it be that despite discrimination and violence against women they live better lives because they don't have to do certain things that men do, like hard physical work or being a provider?

• Answer:

  A major reason that women live longer than men is that guys do many, many more stupid things (myself included, especially when I was younger). When you're looking at overall life expectancies, one thing that shifts average down quite a bit is early death. For example, if you had five men and five women, and four of the men lived to be 85 but one was killed when he was sixteen years old because he decided that it was a great idea to light himself on fire and then try to jump into his pool from the third story of his apartment complex (but missed) in order to impress a pretty girl, whereas all five of the women only lived to be eighty, guess which group has the longer life expectancy? The average life expectancy of the group of women was eighty (they all lived to be the same age) whereas the average life expectancy of the men was...wait for it...only seventy-one ((4*85+1*15)/5). "The guys will think I'm cool and the girls will think I'm hot!" The evolutionary argument can be summarized as, "men do stupid things to impress girls (or other boys, with whom they are competing), which works some of the time, and that 'some of the time' is enough of the time to mean that stupidity can be evolutionarily advantageous." By stupidity here, I mean extreme risk taking. The previous answer oversimplifies things for comedic effect a bit, but what follows is the extension of the same principle, namely that men tend to do more dangerous things than women. Men smoke significantly more than women.[1] Smoking undebiably increases one's risk of untimely death, and five times as many men smoke worldwide as women. This drags down the average life expectancy of men quite a lot. Don't smoke if you want to outlive all those ladies. Men are less likely to see medical professionals. Men hold off seeing doctors for longer when a health problem presents itself and tend to see a doctor only when they have a serious issue, rather than for regular checkups.[2] This, in the case of many health issues that are time sensitive to treatment, can mean a decreased chance of surviving (think cancers, high blood pressure, et cetera). I think that this has to do with machismo and the "go it alone" attitude that many men have. "Hey doc, I've been having this weird thing going on with my heart for the past ten years or so." Men eat less healthy than women do. Diet effect a whole host of medical issues, which can lead to early death (I need to find this study). "Ribs is god's food, honey." These and other reasons, as well: men drink more heavily, the stronger social groups women form (social meaning is an important factor in long life), better stress tolerance, perhaps some underlying physiological differences, and more. No, it's probably not because "men are providers," though I'm sure the greater prevelance of men in certain professions that are higher risk (I'm thinking underwater welders, deep sea fisherman, etc.) does drag the average age down a bit, but remember there are plenty of things that women do (aside from these professions, of course) that men can't do that are dangerous. For example, we males tend not to give birth, which has a whole host of medical dangers attached to it. There are some other reasons as well, which can get a bit more esoteric. I'll highlight what I think is a big one: A lot of my studies focus on evolutionary biology and, in particular, evolutionary human biology. One of the big takeaways of evolutionary theory is that natural selection tends not to act very much after the age when most indivuals of a species have bred. However, there is an exception to this. For a quick hypothetical, let's think about a species that breeds at ten years of age. They do not interact with their offspring very much at all after the first year of life (we'll see why this is important in a moment). So, for some reason, when they are about thirteen years old, the species starts to climb very tall trees--which they didn't do when they were younger--in order to pick the fruit from the top of the trees. Climbing these trees is very dangerous, and it kills about half of the remaining population of over-eleven-year-olds every six months. So now the question is, "would evolution select against these silly tree climbers, since climbing trees is so dangerous and unecessary?" The answer is, probably not. This might seem a little counterintuitive at first. You might be asking yourself, "wait, I thought that evolution selects for the fittest to survive, and this odd tree-climbing tendency seems very, very counterproductive to survival." What we have to consider is that fitness is the relative (to other members of the species) number of viable offspring an individual can produce. Once an individual is past its reproductive age, its actions don't influence its evolutionary fitness, that is, unless its actions increase the fitness of its offspring. Now, back to humans. Something called the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandmother_hypothesis might also give us some insight into why women live longer. In studies of hunter-gatherer tribes, anthropologists have looked at who provided support for children besides the child's parents. One major thing that they found was that the maternal grandmother (the mother's mother) often provided a significant amount of help raising children, which is an incredibly costly endeavor. This has been used to explain the existence of menopause (which is another topic that I won't go into right now), but I think that it also applies here. If, in our recent evolutionary past, older women helped to ensure the survival of their grandchildren, then evolution would indeed select for women that lived longer and were healthier into their old age, in turn raising the relative survival rate of women relative to men. So there you have it, there are quite a few reasons why men do not live as long as women. [1] http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/89/3/10-079905/en/index.html [2] http://men.webmd.com/news/20070620/why-men-skip-doctor-visits