October 28, 2014 | News | New Research Group

Gender Gaps in Health and Survival

From February 1, 2015, Anna Oksuzyan will build up a new Max Planck Research Group. The physician deals with the question of why women and men have different life expectancies.

In all industrialized countries, women outlive men at all ages, but women show much lower health indices than men of the same age, which is the so-called "male-female health-survival paradox”. Research on sex differences in health and mortality has proliferated, yet there is still no full understanding of whether behavioral factors explain most of the gender gap or whether biological and social differences contribute more substantially to explaining sex differences in health and survival. So far, Anna Oksuzyan’s research has focused on the question of whether gender-specific behavioral differences explain the differences in health and mortality between women and men. Together with her new research group “Gender Gaps in Health and Survival”, she will investigate how universal the male-female health-survival paradox is across different countries and what is the role of biological, demographic, and social factors in driving the paradox.

About the person

Anna Oksuzyan comes from Armenia. She has been trained as a medical doctor at Yerevan State Medical University (Armenia), and holds a Master’s degree in Public Health from the American University of Armenia. She arrived at the MPIDR in 2003 to participate in the program offered by the International Max Planck Research School of Demography. She completed her PhD in 2010 at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense. Since 2013, she has been Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Biodemography at same university.

Job announcement

The newly established Max Planck Research Group "Gender Gaps in Health and Survival"
is seeking to make appointments at PhD (up to 2), Post-Doctoral Fellow (up to 2), and Research Scientist levels. more