"Male and female he created them ..."
Are women different from men in the ways that they think or is it more truthful to think of any differences between people as mostly independent of sex? I am asking this in a biblical context, creation, and biblical practises may give slightly different messages. And one's interpretive framework will without doubt play a role in one's answer.
Women's small intestines are 30 centimetres longer than men's
They found that, on average, the male cadavers’ small intestines were slightly over 4 metres in length, while those of the female cadavers were 30 centimetres longer. A statistical analysis suggests that this difference wasn’t a chance finding.
“If [women’s small intestines] are longer and there’s more surface area, that means they can pull more from everything that they eat,” says Hale. “That might be related to reproduction, and it most likely is.
However, this anatomical difference probably doesn’t entirely explain why some gastrointestinal conditions are more common in one sex than the other. For example, Temple Health in Pennsylvania reports that women are more likely to develop Crohn’s disease – inflammation of any part of the digestive system, from the mouth to the anus – but men are more likely to have ulcerative colitis – inflammation of the large bowel, from the colon to the anus.
The sex differences that impact the strength of your immune system
… Which X chromosome is inactivated is determined randomly when embryos are a few weeks old. All the tissues in a female body are therefore mosaics, with half their cells using the X chromosome inherited from the mother and the rest using the one from the father. Because many genes involved in the immune system are located on the X chromosome, this means that female bodies have twice the genetic variation to call on when fighting infections. “Women have more diversity when it comes to individual genes,” says Shäron Moalem, a genetic researcher based in New York.
Automimmune diseases
In addition, not all the genes on the inactivated X chromosome are switched off, with some immune system genes remaining functional on both X chromosomes – including one called
toll-like receptor 7 (
TLR7), which helps cells detect viruses. This means that most women have double the dose of
TLR7 in their immune system.
Having a stronger immune response is a double-edged sword, though: it may explain why women are more susceptible to autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, where the body starts to recognise its own cells as dangerous and attacks them...
Low testosterone levels may protect women from kidney injury
Low testosterone levels appear to protect kidney cells in mice from cell death. The finding could explain why women are at a lower risk of acute kidney injury than men.
Tomokazu Souma at Duke University in North Carolina collected kidney samples from eight mice – four females and four males – and genetically sequenced them. They identified 128 genes that were expressed differently between the two sexes and further analysis revealed many of these genes were related to a particular cell process called NRF2. This process is known to protect against ferroptosis, a form of cell death that is a driver of acute kidney injury in people, where the kidneys suddenly decline in performance.
Neuroscientists are ignoring the differences between males and females
Galea and her team also found that just 3 per cent of the papers they looked at were female-only studies, compared with 25 per cent involving just male subjects.
“Single-sex studies are important because women’s health is not just how they differ from men,” says Galea. “It’s about how the female’s unique physiology and gendered effects may be driving some of the differences in outcomes, disease rates and treatment needs.”
“We’ve known for a very long time that sex affects a wide array of disease traits,” says Judith Mank at the University of British Columbia, who wasn’t involved in the study. “This analysis makes it evident that scientific journals also need to make their expectations clear about data analysis methodology, and educate their peer reviewers about those expectations.”
Didn't perform a deep search, just new science.
