The Missing Half of Longevity Science
Why Women Are The Key
The goal of extending human healthspan cannot be achieved without completely understanding the biological differences between men and women as they age.
By Oriana Kraft (FemTechnology, ETH Zurich)
Key Findings
- •Women live on average 5 years longer than men globally, yet spend 25% longer in poor health
- •40% of longevity studies used only male subjects or failed to report sex at all
- •Nearly 73% of interventions tested show sex-specific results, meaning male-only studies blind the field to critical discoveries
- •Female biology offers a natural laboratory of resilience with built-in repair mechanisms
- •Understanding female longevity mechanisms could unlock treatments that benefit both sexes
The Longevity Paradox
Women live on average 5 years longer than men globally, meaning they have a longer overall lifespan. However, they often spend a larger proportion of their years dealing with chronic illness, disability, and frailty. Women spend roughly 25% longer in poor health than men.
Understanding why women live longer but spend more time in poor health than men is one of the most important open problems in biology and economics alike.
Female Biology as a Natural Laboratory
Female biology offers a natural laboratory of resilience. Across the lifespan, women's bodies undergo repeated cycles of transformation (monthly hormonal changes, pregnancy, menopause), each involving major shifts in hormones, metabolism, and tissue renewal. The uterus alone regenerates its lining roughly 400 times in a lifetime.
These processes are evidence of built-in resilience and repair. Better understanding those mechanisms could reveal levers of longevity that male-centric models have missed.
The Research Gap
In a systematic review of pharmacological lifespan and healthspan studies in mice, 40% of longevity studies used only male subjects or failed to report sex at all. Among those that did test both sexes, nearly 73% showed sex-specific results.
This means that by failing to study females, we are actively filtering out meaningful discoveries: obscuring mechanisms unique to women, distorting our understanding of the aging process, and slowing the development of targeted, effective longevity therapeutics for both sexes.
Biomarker Recalibration
Much of longevity research depends on biomarkers that act as proxies for aging. However, those baselines are mostly built on male data. Recalibrating these models would mean rebuilding "normal" from the ground up:
- Establishing sex-, age-, and hormone-stage-specific reference ranges
- Retraining risk algorithms on sex-balanced data
- Weighting variables differently where biology diverges
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