“Some of my colleagues in the Department of Sociology in Helsinki wonder whether it is meaningful to study differences in mortality. After all, the mortality rate is the same for everyone: one death per person” (Valkonem 1993)[1]Henry Allingham (6 June 1896 – 18 July 2009), veteran of the First World War and, for a month, the oldest confirmed living man in the world, was an anomaly. Supercentenarians themselves are rare, of course, but male ones are especially rare[2]. However, it is not only among the elderly and frail that women outlive their male counterparts; Indeed, it has been noted as an almost universal truth, spanning all ages, places and recent times, that when it comes to life expectancy, women have the upper hand. The reasons for this trend have been widely explored by doctors, epidemiologists, biologists, demographers, actuaries and lay people, but the opinions of these experts are very divergent. As Nathanson (1984) stated: “It is the uniquely protean quality of sex as a conceptual category that allows the student to see in it what his training tells him to look for.: ...