This distinction is important for understanding and appreciating the significance of social support and healthy life pathways. The Terman subjects on healthy life paths, with great social networks, were much more likely to live into their seventies, eighties, and nineties, while their fellow participants (who were equally healthy and intelligent as children, but didn’t travel such healthy pathways) often succumbed before age sixty-five. The best surgical procedures and the most powerful pharmaceuticals of today are considered very successful if they extend life for several years. Of course if you are one of those patients, you are very grateful, but think of the much greater benefits that healthy pathways often produce—perhaps the decades of longer life that earlier sanitation advances, childhood vaccines, and public health measures achieved.
What It Means for You: Guideposts to Health and Long Life
The lives of the Terman participants showed that taking time to cultivate social networks is important not just to the quality of life but also to its quantity. Feeling good, staying calm, and breathing deeply can be signs of health but they are not its root causes. Instead, social relations should be the first place to look for improving health and longevity.
You may recall from the last chapter that John was not a religious person. Yet he lived a long life, and his social ties were a big part of his secret. For John, becoming more religious would not likely have improved his longevity because he was already enjoying the strongest benefits of being religious—the social elements. In contrast, Donna’s case is one where congregational life could have made a huge difference. Donna didn’t spend much time with friends or colleagues, focusing instead on raising her sons and just getting by after her divorce. When her sons were grown Donna pretty much quit going to church and became even more socially isolated. If Donna had instead become more involved in her church (or some other meaningful organizations), using her considerable intelligence to join with others to make a difference in her community, it very well might have improved her prospects for a long life.
John and Barbara found social connections in their careers. Barbara maintained additional social links through her congregation and extended network of friends. Linda’s ties were mostly through family and church groups, but the effect remained the same. It was not those who felt the most connected and appreciated, but those who had many actual ties in their social networks, and who were engaged with helping others, who lived longest.
It is worth reiterating that social networks represent an important—perhaps the most important—way to change one’s life pathway. In many ways, it is also a very doable fix, in a relatively straightforward manner. Repairing a troubled marriage or unproductive career is also very important to health but is quite difficult and will take a lot of time. In contrast, setting aside a few hours each week to volunteer, or joining a group that shares one of your passions, increases the size of your social network and provides opportunities to help others. You’re never too old and it’s never too late or too early to start this—and the returns can be enormous in terms of life’s quality and quantity.
CHAPTER 13
The Gender Gap in Long Life
Almost everywhere in the world, women outlive men. This fact is so well appreciated that it figured in the long-running joke of the comedian Alan King: “Do you know the six words that appear in every man’s obituary? He is survived by his wife.”
Perhaps fittingly, Mr. King himself was survived by his wife of fifty-seven years, Jeanette. Yet although this female advantage in longevity has long been studied, it remains puzzling. Many things contribute to this mysterious phenomenon, and not always in intuitive ways. For example, women generally face more health problems during their lives, yet men die earlier of most major causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, and suicide. While examining the pathways of the Terman participants we uncovered many fascinating hints as to why the average woman outlives the average man.
Possibly most intriguing is the relationship between the deaths of males and the deaths of their female spouses. The film director Edward Dmytryk, who died at ninety after a life full of challenges, was survived by his wife of sixty-four years. Norris Bradbury, the award-winning atomic physicist who lived to eighty-eight, was survived by his wife of almost sixty-five years. Even Ancel Keys, the cholesterol expert who lived to be a hundred was—yes—survived by his wife. However, what about those men who lost their wives? Many of the Terman men who were widowed did not live much longer after their loss. This was even the case for Terman himself—his wife, Anna Belle Minton Terman, died in early 1956, and he died later that same year, right before Christmas.
We know that much of the health and long life of the Terman men was facilitated by having a supportive wife and stable marriage, but was this related to the feminine dimensions typically provided by the wives? Did each spouse’s masculinity/femininity and related traits really matter?
Measuring Masculinity and Femininity
Paul was a tough, masculine guy while James was more of a “family man.” Linda was quite feminine while Donna was more of a tomboy. When we started investigating male-female differences in longevity we decided to distinguish biology from psychology—what is usually called the difference between biological sex and social gender. Biological sex refers to whether one is female or male—in chromosomal terms, XX or XY. Gender, on the other hand, refers to the psychosocial category of male-typical versus female-typical identities and behaviors. These are the qualities of masculinity versus femininity. You can easily relate to this difference by calling to mind girls who are labeled “girly girls” as compared to tomboys or contrasting a polite, “man of the arts” type with a rugged and somewhat crude “tough guy” type.
Being more masculine or feminine is not at all the same as being homosexual or heterosexual. Dr. Terman himself, more than a half century ago, explained it this way: “It would be a grave error to assume that any M-F [masculine-feminine] score approaching the mean of the opposite sex justifies in itself a diagnosis of homosexuality. One may be a fairly pronounced invert in sex temperament without being at all a sex invert [gay] in the usual sense.”83
By the way, there were of course gays and lesbians in the study, and some married (the opposite sex), which was not unusual in the 1930s and 1940s. But because of the significant threats to individuals who were openly gay, Dr. Terman hid their identities. He even destroyed letters and other information. So our analyses of men and women could not directly take sexual orientation into account.
This issue of masculinity and femininity was a tricky subject to try to investigate. If we used typically male-associated behaviors like drinking, smoking, and promiscuity to define masculinity, then we would be biasing our results because these behaviors are known to be unhealthy. We had to find a way to evaluate masculinity and femininity without tapping into unhealthy lifestyles in our measures.
So we turned to a collaboration with well-known gender expert Dr. Richard Lippa at the California State University in Fullerton. Richard created “gender diagnosticity” scores indicating how masculine or feminine each person was. His approach is important because many traditional masculinity measures seem really to be measuring instrumentality—the quality related to serving a purpose and reaching a goal. In western cultures, instrumentality is more prevalent in men, for a variety of reasons. Many femininity scales seem really to be measuring emotionality or expressiveness—qualities of being caring and sensitive to others’ feelings. Expressiveness is more prevalent in women. Although such masculinity and femininity scales are pretty good at describing the stereotypical man or woman, they aren’t very good at taking account of certain other aspects of our understanding of what it means to be “masculine” and “feminine.” More than that, they do not yield a good enough sense of health-relevant hobbies, interests, activities, and behaviors. And, importantly, we wanted to know how masculine or feminine each individual Terman participant was compared to his or her fellow subjects.
83
Dr. Terman’s explanation of the fact that scoring similarly to someone of the opposite sex was not diagnostic of homosexuality is in Terman and Oden,