When feminists assert that we live in a patriarchy, they don't mean the narrow, Oxford Dictionary meaning of the word, as in "father or eldest male is head of the family and descent is reckoned through the male line" or "men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it". Instead, when feminists assert that we live in a patriarchy, they usually invent new, broader definition of the word, which usually boils down to "here are examples of women's disadvantages in society". Such definition is, of course, sexist, because men have even more disadvantages, but hey, if all you want is a pissing contest in who has it worse, then hold my bear.

Let us start with the concept of Years of potential life lost (YPLL) metric that is often used to determine how to divide up scarce resources for medical research. If we use this metric on something familiar, like the mass incarceration pandemic in the US, we could say that if an average prisoner looses maybe some 5 years of his free life (I made this number up), and there are some 2,000,000 prisoners in the US, and almost all are men, then men in the US lose some 10 million years of free life as a result of imprisonment.

Now, let's talk about the gender life expectancy gap, or how I will call it from now on, the Life Gap.

  • While some biological factors are theorized, the great variance between countries suggests that the major factors for the gap are social. Among highly developed countries, the gap ranges from 2.7 years in the Netherlands to 6.1 years in Germany. And apparently only 1 year between certain monks and nuns.
  • The traditional argument goes by saying that men consume more tobacco, alcohol and drugs than women and are more likely to die from associated diseases. While this is most certainly true, we are not going to blame the victims, right? Instead, we need to ask: Why do men drink more alcohol? And what has society done to address this problem? The same goes for diet, accidents, homicides, suicides and other factors that are "the victim's own fault".
    (Although, Women Now Drink As Much As Men — Not So Much For Pleasure, But To Cope, yikes.)
  • Yet other factors can be more broadly attributed to our society. Men suffer almost all work-related accidents, men under achieve in higher education (in western countries), male health research receives less funding, men under report illnesses and receive inferior healthcare. Men are the majority of victims of violent crimes and are generally considered more expendable. Men are twice as likely to die from COVID-19 but are neither prioritized in care nor in vaccination. The list goes on and on.

So how big is the impact? Using our Years of potential life lost (YPLL) metric we could calculate that in the US alone, if men keep dying on average 4.4 years prematurely, the current generation will lose some 165,501,325 x 4.4 = 728 million years. Now compare it to the 10 million years of free life lost in the mass incarceration that everybody agrees is an enormous problem.

Of course, one could argue that old men dying sooner is not comparable with young/average men loosing years of life in the can. But that would be a misunderstanding. The shorter life span usually means that men's bodies age faster and quality of life goes down as illnesses creep in. We could say that men's bodies actually spend less time in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and sixties as they deteriorate faster.

Worldwide, the loss of life caused by men's premature deaths is comparable to the loss of life in the WW1. Count with me, 60 million people die every year, half are men, each dies ca. 5 years prematurely. That makes some 150 million YPLL per year. The WW1 combined military and civilian death toll was ca. 20 million over 4 years. We could estimate each victim died ca. 30 years prematurely, which gives us the same 150 million YPLL per year. The magnitude of men's lives lost to the life gap is like the First World War still going on, year after year, forever.

Let us put the gender life expectancy gap into yet another perspective: the COVID-19 pandemic reduced the life expectancy of the US population by estimated 1.13 years. As a society we broadly agreed that we simply can not throw the seniors and the vulnerable over the board and we eventually turned the world upside-down to stop the pandemic. But half of the world population dies 5 years early and there is not even a dedicated Wikipedia page about the topic? (Seriously, while there is Wikipedia page for everything, including the Gender imbalance in STEM fields, there is none for the Life Gap).

In the beginning we said feminists will usually define the patriarchy as a random collection of women's disadvantages. Next time you argue about this topic, ask the feminist wether she would trade the famous pay gap (adjusted is 0%-5%) for 5 years of her life.