Sex Differences in Health: Evidence and Explanations 385vulnerability. Thus, men may be less likely
than women to seek help when ill because
help-seeking behavior is inconsistent with
the male gender role.
Studies show that there are some simi-
larities and some differences in how men and
women respond to symptoms. One study
found that women reported more physical
symptoms than men did, but that women
and men were equally likely to have visited a
physician in the prior month in response to
each symptom (Wyke, Hunt, & Ford, 1998).
Women’s and men’s help-seeking responses
seem to be similar when symptoms are se-
vere. Women are more likely than men to
visit the doctor for minor conditions, but
there are no sex differences in visits to the
doctor for serious illness (Dracup et al., 1995;
Waldron, 1995, 1997). Women may visit
the physician more frequently than men for
minor symptoms because they have a lower
tolerance for symptoms or feel more com-
fortable seeking help for minor illness.
It is not clear whether women or men
delay longer before seeking help for symp-
toms of a serious illness. Studies of people
who have had heart attacks find there is a
tendency for women to delay longer than
men before seeking help for symptoms
(Dracup et al., 1995; Moscucci et al., 2004).
By contrast, men appear to delay longer than
women before seeking help for symptoms
of cancer (Evans et al., 2005). The findings
from both of these studies may be explained
by men’s and women’s lack of knowledge
about specific diseases. Women may associ-
ate heart disease with being male and be less
sensitive to heart disease symptoms. The
study of people with cancer showed that men
were less knowledgeable than women about
cancer and its warning signs. Find out if your
female and male peers respond similarly to
symptoms in Do Gender 10.6.activity days and more chronic illnesses than
men. In addition, fixed role obligations were
associated with fewer restricted activity days
and fewer chronic illnesses. Thus, women
had more restricted activities than men be-
cause they had fewer fixed roles, and men
were less likely to adopt the sick role because
they had more fixed roles. There are alterna-
tive interpretations of these data, however.
Perhaps men’s good health allowed them
to have more fixed roles. Because the study
is correlational, the causal relation between
fixed roles and health cannot be determined.
Today, however, it is not the case that
men necessarily have more fixed roles than
women. The implication of the fixed role
hypothesis is that women who have a large
number of role obligations, such as women
with children or women who work, would be
less likely to adopt the sick role. Are changes
in women’s roles associated with changes in
their health? If women now have more fixed
roles, there should be fewer sex differences in
morbidity. To some extent this is true, as will
be shown in Chapter 12 when we focus on
the relation of paid employment to health.Implications for Mortality
Just as women’s illness behaviors may ac-
count for their greater morbidity compared
to men, these same illness behaviors may ac-
count for women’s longer life span. Perhaps
women respond to acute symptoms of ill-
ness more quickly, which makes it appear at
a given point in time that women are sicker
than men. However, women’s early response
to symptoms could prevent a minor illness
from developing into a more serious one.
Once a symptom is perceived, is there
evidence that women and men respond to
the symptom differently? Admitting illness
may be construed as admitting weakness orM10_HELG0185_04_SE_C10.indd 385 6/21/11 8:54 AM