Times have changed and with them the gender roles and norms associated with jobs, hobbies, and so on. Among the Terman subjects, women indicated stronger interest in landscape gardening than did men, although today it might be a more male-typical activity. This is a good example of how details about gender roles and concepts of what is masculine or feminine are shaped in part by society (including the media) and influenced by people’s changing behaviors. But some people still gravitate to one side of the activity spectrum while others move toward the other side. Details evolve over time, but the principles remain the same.
Femininity and Long Life
Among men, the more masculine tended to be heavier, more physically active, and to have riskier hobbies. Among women, the more masculine tended to drink more and earn more money. That made sense, but the question remained: Who lived longer?
The eye-opener in our findings was that the more masculine men and the more masculine women had an increased mortality risk, while the more feminine women and the more feminine men were relatively protected. It seems that part of what helps women to live longer isn’t just that they’re female, but the fact that women are, on average, more feminine than men.84
In other words, the gender gap in longevity isn’t all based on the Y chromosome. Those who skewed more feminine—women like Linda and men like James—often had similar mortality risks, whereas those who were more masculine—like Paul and Donna—were also somewhat alike.
What is it that makes femininity a helpful characteristic, at least in terms of the length of life? Some of it has to do with gender roles—that is, the things that society says are appropriate for men versus women to do. For example, it used to be quite common for men to smoke but rather uncommon for women (especially feminine women) to do so. This changed in the 1970s, as illustrated by cigarette advertisements for Virginia Slims, which were specifically marketed to women: “You’ve come a long way, baby!” And when it did, women’s mortality risk and cancer risk rose. When smoking, a behavior that seriously threatens health, was primarily carried out by men, with only the more adventurous, less feminine women daring to light up, men as a group had a much greater likelihood of dying from various cancers and other smoking-related causes than women. As women’s roles changed, and smoking became an acceptably feminine behavior, the difference in risk from smoking-related causes began to narrow. Though important, that finding itself is not very surprising.
But smoking is only part of the story. When we analyzed causes of death, we found that feminine women and feminine men were less likely to die from all causes, not just cancer or smoking-related diseases.
As ideas about men and women have changed, we wondered if this masculine-feminine difference was confirmed by health statistics from recent decades. As one example, in the Terman years, when men held primary financial responsibility for the family and were working in more hostile environments than were most women, the rate of cardiovascular disease was significantly higher for men than for women. Women’s lives, on the contrary, often centered around the home and neighborhood—a more “feminine” environment. However, as women entered the workplace in greater numbers—frequently taking on many traditionally masculine responsibilities—some men moved in the opposite direction—taking on more social and emotional roles—and another bit of the male-female difference in lifelong mortality risk (including cardiovascular risk) disappeared.85 It is entirely possible, by our reading, that these mortality shifts are related to the changes in masculinity and femininity, in men and women.
Social Ties and Gender
Perhaps the issue wasn’t stress, but coping. Among the Terman children, being moody in childhood was relevant to increased mortality risk for boys but not for girls.86 Similarly, later in life it was the Terman men who had experienced mental difficulties and breakdowns who were at greatest risk for earlier mortality.87 Stereotypes would suggest that these men were coping by using typically masculine unhealthy mechanisms like heading out to the bar. It turned out, however, that differences in coping with stress through smoking and drinking alcohol did not explain the mortality discrepancies.
What did masculine and feminine personalities dictate in terms of social ties? The idea was that moody women or those struggling with mental health issues might be better able to garner resources by letting others know about their problems. In general, women report more symptoms of ill health (both physical and mental), seek more care than do men, and are more ready to admit when they need help.88 Masculine men, on the other hand, may be especially unwilling to admit weakness or to seek help. In looking at the data, we confirmed that those who demonstrated male-typical characteristics were less outgoing and sociable and had weaker social support networks. The most masculine tended to keep others at an emotional distance. So we wondered what happened to masculine men after they lost their partners.
Men’s Health After Loss
What happens to men, especially masculine men, when their wives die, breaking their key social support lifeline? As we saw earlier in this book, a stable and healthy marriage can indeed nudge one toward long life while the stresses associated with divorce are health harming. We also saw that the effects of divorce were dramatically different for men and women—men suffered more ill effects than did women. Might it be that women and men would also adjust differently to the death of their life partner? And would the personality characteristics of the surviving spouse be relevant?
Although various scientific studies suggest that a man’s risk of dying can increase after the death of his spouse, the reasons why this occurs are not fully established. Sometimes the men seem to die of a “broken heart”—without a close social tie, they simply lose the will to live. In other cases, the wife was an important regulator of health behaviors, and without her reminders and encouragement, the bereaved man fails to take care of his health. So we were curious to know which characteristics allowed some widowers to thrive anyway.
How did men’s and women’s experience of widowhood differ, and might personality influence the reactions to bereavement? Most studies of the effects of bereavement are limited because they begin after the bereavement or, occasionally, right before. In other words, if you were going to study the effects of the death of one’s partner, you would start by finding people who had lost their spouses (or were about to). This is common sense but it is inadequate in a scientific sense for two reasons: a person’s characteristics can change during bereavement, and the appropriate comparison groups—of people not bereaved—are not included. No study had ever looked comprehensively at preexisting characteristics, such as personality, to see if they were related to how well people do after losing a spouse, compared to those who have not lost a spouse.
We went back to the measures of the Terman subjects’ personalities using their responses in 1940, when they were about thirty years old, now limiting our focus to those who were married. We classified them according to whether they were widowed during the following four decades and then looked at how long they lived, over the next sixty-plus years.
84
For one of our studies of gender and longevity, see R. A. Lippa, L. R. Martin, and H. S. Friedman, “Gender-Related Individual Differences and Mortality in the Terman Longitudinal Study: Is Masculinity Hazardous to Your Health?”
85
For a discussion of social roles and mortality risk see I. Waldron, “Contributions of Changing Gender Differences in Behavior and Social Roles to Changing Gender Differences in Mortality,” in
86
Our initial report on the importance of stable moods for boys is in J. E. Schwartz, H. S. Friedman, J. S. Tucker, C. Tomlinson-Keasey, D. Wingard, and M. H. Criqui, “Sociodemographic and Psychosocial Factors in Childhood as Predictors of Adult Mortality,”
87
For more information on the relationship between mental difficulties and mortality risk see L. R. Martin, H. S. Friedman, J. S. Tucker, J. E. Schwartz, M. H. Criqui, D. L. Wingard, and C. Tomlinson-Keasey, “An Archival Prospective Study of Mental Health and Longevity,”
88
More on sex differences in health are in the following three articles: C. M. Gijsbers van Wijk, K. P. van Vliet, A. M. Kolk, and W. T. Everaerd, “Symptom Sensitivity and Sex Differences in Physical Morbidity: A Review of Health Surveys in the United States and the Netherlands,”