What the Research Shows…

About Our Brains

• Contrary to what most of us believe the aging brain is not degenerating. Dr. Francine Benes at Harvard Medical School has discovered a growth spurt in myelin – the message carrier – in the part of the brain that is responsible for making judgments, finding new solutions to old problems, and managing emotions – i.e., not sweating the small stuff. There are only two life stages when myelination increases–at adolescence and around age 45-50.

About Our Bodies

• As estrogen diminishes testosterone begins to assert more influence, including more assertive behavior - and facial hair.
• A woman turning 50 in 2005, has a 40% chance of living to be 100, but also has the same chance of getting Alzheimer’s.
• While marriage is especially good for men’s health, a bad marriage is especially bad for the woman’s health. Numerous studies show that lack of decision-making power is a major contributor to stress and depression.
• Women are not "small men" though scientists have been studying them as if they were. Dr. Marianne J. Legato writes: "We are finding that in every system of the body, from the very hairs of our head to the way our hearts beat, there are significant and unique sex-based differences in human physiology." One of the major differences is in symptoms of life threatening conditions. Women’s heart attacks have gone undiagnosed because the signs were as elusive as "feeling funny" as opposed to the sharp pains that men report.
• Men produce 52 % more serotonin than women, which may explain why women get more depressed.

About Our Behavior

• The "Fight or Flight" response is not as universal as scientists have claimed. Typically, it is more a male reaction to stress and danger. "Tend and Befriend" is the way women respond to danger; we band together and try to make peace. This was discovered by two women scientists who noticed that when men in the lab were stressed they retreated to their offices, while stressed women gathered around the coffee-maker and bonded.
• Women thrive on cooperation. While crowding made male rats more stressed, it calmed the females perhaps because of the release in women of oxytocin – known as the "cuddle chemical." Oxytocin plays a role in labor before birth and in lactation afterwards.

About Our Roles

• Anthropologist Kristen Hawkes asked what nature had in mind for the only species in which the female lived beyond the reproductive stage. Her work with a native culture – the Hadza people – found that postmenopausal women played a crucial role in childrearing. Without them, not enough children would survive the long human childhood to continue the species.
• A study by two management professors identified a "zig-zag" work pattern among executive women, as opposed to the career "ladder" that men follow. They may take time off or cut back on work during periods of intense care-giving, but they arrive at their fifties raring to keep going.

About Our Sexuality

• A Newsweek poll showed that 30% of women between 45 and 65 thought sex was better at their age than for younger people, and another 41% said it was "about the same."
• A Kinsey Institute paper reports that six out of ten people over 45 who have partners have sex at least once a week throughout their fifties and sixties and once a month well into their seventies and eighties.
• Women over 50 are one of the largest growing populations of AIDS victims. "This is a generation that didn’t necessarily grow up thinking or talking about condoms," says one sex educator, and many of these women are back in the dating game for the first time after many years.