Even if you only consider that many women will one day endure months of pregnancy and hours of labor all to push something the size of a watermelon out of their vaginas, it’s easy to accept that women are pretty darn strong – more so even than men, many of whom can be downed for days by a simple cold virus.
And now we’ve finally got some hard science to back up the anecdotal evidence.
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Although the recent research defines men as people with an XY chromosome makeup and women as ones with XX’s – meaning it applies to cis individuals and not people who identify as different from their chromosomal makeup – it’s still pretty damning when it comes to which of the sexes is more likely to survive through tough situations. James Vaupel and his team at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense concluded that in fact women are statistically more likely to survive in times of crises (I mean, we saw this on The Walking Dead, so good luck with the zombies, dudes!) like famines, epidemics, and enslavement. The conclusions were drawn by measuring things like population and life expectancy, and it boils down to the fact that women are survivors.
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Virginia Zarulli, from the University of Southern Denmark’s Institute of Public Health explained to Global Citizen that females are simply born with a different sort of advantage:
“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 that possibility.”
Not only that, but as a report in The Guardian points out, bodies that produce estrogen have more of a guard against disease. Producing testosterone increases the risk of fatal infections, not to mention that high levels of testosterone leads to more risky and life threatening behavior.
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The advantage begins at birth – male infants have higher mortality rates than their female counterparts – and continues through the end of life, as the life expectancy for women globally is four years longer than that of men.
Don’t feel bad, guys – you’re still really good at plenty of things. When it comes to digging into life by the fingernails and not letting go until God him- (her-?)self rips you loose, though, women take the cake from cradle to grave.
So make friends with the women in your life, maybe consider it part of your preparation for the zombie apocalypse. I mean. It can’t hurt.