Twenty years ago, when I began researching and writing about men’s health at the University of California at Berkeley, men in the United States were dying more than 7 years younger than women. It was a time when “men’s health” was really nothing more than an oxymoron. The gender gap in longevity, however, was not new; it had been steadily widening since 1920, when women and men in the United States lived lives that were equal in length. But when I conducted training sessions about improving men’s health, physicians and other health professionals were consistently shocked to learn of this gap in the life spans of women and men,.
