Consider the aorta: our body’s largest artery stiffens and slackens with age, like overstretched elastic, and can bulge out forming an aneurysm that’s prone to rupture. Aortic aneurysms occur six times more often in men than women. But if a woman does have one, it’s more likely to burst, she’s less likely to get effective treatment and more likely to die. These outcomes are a tangle of sex (influenced by chromosomes, physiology and hormones) and gender (how we identify, behave in our environment and interact with one another). Why is our society calibrated for men so that women receive substandard medical care? And why are researchers not studying half the world’s population who are excellent at not getting aneurysms?
Eve is interested in the origins of such questions, plumbing the depths of what’s different – for better and for worse – about the female body. This long overdue evolutionary account is the pre-history to Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women (2019), showing how wrong it is to think of women as just men with breasts and wombs bolted on. Over hundreds of thousands of years, women have developed more sensitive noses (particularly around ovulation and pregnancy), finer hearing at high frequencies, extended colour vision, and longer life expectancy than men by an impressive half decade. Forget plasma exchange and supplementation – entrepreneurs trying to extend human life should be studying women, who comprise around 80% of today’s centenarians.
