Giving Compass' Take:

• Time Magazine writes on a recent study showing that women tend to live longer than men for biological health and mental health reasons. 

• Regardless of gender, what can funders in the health sector do to make sure that innovations in longevity science for all?

• To read about research on the effects of alcohol and longevity, click here. 

The numbers don’t lie: women tend to live longer than men. The average American man will live to age 76, according to the latest CDC figures, while the average woman in America will live to age 81.

And a woman’s extra years tend to be healthy ones. The World Health Organization’s HALE index, which calculates the number of years a man or woman can expect to live without a major disease or injury, finds that American men can look forward to 67 healthy years, while American women will enjoy 70 years of “full heath.”

This male-female lifespan gap is not a new phenomenon; experts have known about it for decades. It’s also not restricted to Americans. “This gender gap in life expectancy is true for all societies, and it is also true for the great apes,” says Dr. Perminder Sachdev, a professor of neuropsychiatry at the University of New South Wales in Australia who has studied human longevity.

Read the full article about why women live longer than men by Markham Heid at Time Magazine