WOMEN are superior to men. It’s no good arguing or (if you are a woman) congratulating my wife on a job well done. It is a scientific fact that while women may be the physically weaker gender in some respects, they are genetically superior.

This is reflected in many ways, not least the fact that women live longer than men, by an average of five years in westernised societies. Partly, this is to do with behavioural issues: young men in particular are inclined to indulge in high-risk behaviours such as driving recklessly and getting into drunken brawls, which shorten their average life span. Males in general are also more likely than females to delay going to the doctor when they don’t feel well, reducing their chances of overcoming diseases such as cancer through early detection. And, whether because of societal stereotypes or something innate to the gender, men don’t handle stress as well as women do, tending to bottle it up and damage their health in the long term, rather than defuse the problem by talking it through with a partner or friend. As a result, global suicide rates are four times higher for men.

Since all of these factors are at least partly behavioural in nature, it could be argued that we would live longer if we simply changed our ways. As Eliza Doolittle might have responded to Prof Higgins: Why can’t a man be more like a woman? The short answer is our DNA is not programmed that way. There is also clear evidence that men’s lower life expectancy is mainly a result of factors that are out of their control. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal highlighted several of these, such as the fact that while men typically have proportionally less body fat than women, it tends to collect around the abdomen, which is more of a health risk. They have lower levels of “good” HDL cholesterol, on average, and are more vulnerable to heart disease even when lifestyle factors are taken into account. A 60-year-old man is 39% more likely to die of diabetes than his female counterpart, for no apparent reason other than having the wrong combination of chromosomes. There are many other such examples.

So what, you may ask. Are you looking for sympathy? Well yes, actually. Not because of the bad hand God has dealt us men — she’s a vengeful deity, after all, so it’s best to accept our fate gracefully — but because our biological misfortune is being compounded by active discrimination.

Last week, a 61-year-old KwaZulu-Natal man, Francis Blackmore, was arrested in Cape Town after holding the provincial head of the Human Rights Commission hostage at gunpoint for two hours. Much was made in the local media and on television of the commissioner’s bravery in persuading the gunman to let his staff go and hold him alone instead. But they glossed over the explanation Blackmore gave for his desperate behaviour — he was protesting against the fact that, as a rule in SA, men reach pensionable age only at 65, whereas women start receiving payments at 60.

Now, I am not for a moment suggesting that Blackmore’s means of addressing his complaint was correct — although in choosing that approach he may have been as much of a slave to his chromosomes as a woman who burst into tears and sought out a sympathetic authority figure to confide in. He has a point, though. Why do women get to retire five years earlier than men? Given the life expectancy statistics, it would make more sense for the situation to be reversed.

Addressing discrimination against women has been a priority in SA for the past decade, and rightly so given that SA’s history is marked as much by sexism as racism. But restoring women’s rights should not mean that men lose theirs. Why are insurance companies allowed to discriminate blatantly against men as a gender by granting women preferential car insurance rates, for instance? Not all women are safer drivers than men, even if that is true on the whole. We don’t allow such discrimination on the basis or race or HIV status, even when there is statistical justification, so why gender?

Internationally, the pendulum has swung so far in favour of women in respect of issues such as access to children in the case of divorce and funding for research into gender-specific diseases that there is a danger of creating a new group of victims. Breast and ovarian cancer research gets far more funding than prostate cancer studies, for instance, and there is persistent societal and professional bias against men in the treatment of depression.

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