According to research published last week the gender gap is closing fast when it comes to life expectancy. Women can now expect to live a mere 4½ years longer than men — the smallest gap in 30 years and one that is likely to continue to close.

A number of reasons are suggested for this, the first and most obvious being smoking. While the death rate among men has halved since the 1970s, it has increased dramatically among women because so many took up the habit during the 1960s and 1970s and are still clinging to the fags, or at least giving up in smaller numbers.

Another factor is women’s new-found passion for binge drinking (there has been a threefold rise over the past 15 years), resulting in livers like pâté at an increasingly young age, which can’t be good whichever way you look at it. I bet those intent on this slow form of suicide can’t wait for 24-hour drinking and even cheaper booze; how nice for them that the thicko government is happy to oblige.

Smoking and alcohol aside, women are also more likely to be obese than men although, foxily enough, men are catching up. It is a grotesquely unattractive picture that’s emerging: fat, faggy, drunk women, doomed to die younger than they would otherwise — especially, according to the figures, if they are poor. Plus ça change. Or, in Kate Moss’s case, it is a thin, faggy, drunk, coked-up (and the rest, allegedly) woman, who is doomed to die younger than she would otherwise even though she is very rich.

This is only part of the reason, though. The most salient point is that many women work twice as hard as men — by having a job outside the home as well as one within it — and this is bound to take its toll.

Professor Cary Cooper of Lancaster University, an expert on stress, said “women who go out to work also do most at home in terms of child rearing and domestic work. There’s a nod towards equality in terms of more men doing work around the home, but women carry the greater burden. As a result they are emulating men in bad health behaviours. They don’t have time to eat properly or exercise and they smoke to alleviate the stress.”

Equality is a complete crock as far as women are concerned and these figures prove it. You work your guts out and panic about having a family. Encouraged by the sisterhood, who place professional success above all else — a position that is so babyishly defensive that it is doomed to failure, as well as being completely pathetic — you delay having children until you are sufficiently far up the greasy pole.

You finally produce a child or two stupidly late (dangerously so, according to research last week: having a child beyond the age of 35 is now officially Not a Good Idea) and thus double your workload by trying to combine work and childcare, to say nothing of the other domestic pursuits. You spend the best years of your life haring around like a blue-arsed fly, permanently exhausted and harassed. You feel guilty if you prefer the office to the nursery and guilty if you don’t.

You have the sneaky feeling that this isn’t quite what you had in mind for yourself and the equally depressing intuition that it may get worse before it gets better. So you drink like a teenager, even though you are middle-aged. And you smoke. Ditto. You are increasingly prone to all sorts of exciting cancers. Oh, and now you’re statistically going to die younger, too. Seriously — what’s the point?

The idea was never to turn into men or to meld indistinguishably with them, and yet that seems to be what has happened — we are turning into a kind of one-size-fits-all, all-smoking, all-drinking super-stressed species, with high blood pressure and road rage and an unprecedented degree of anxiety, regardless of gender.

For women, the more female, often family-related, stresses are present alongside the work ones. Something has to give, surely, somewhere along the line. I don’t understand why we need to turn into men to get things done: mightn’t it be worth a try to celebrate all the ways in which we are different, instead of focusing obsessively on forcing similarities?

Meanwhile, men are having a little crisis of their own, it was also reported last week, because women are becoming problematically “assertive”. A survey by JWT, the advertising agency, found that 23% of men and 22% of women could imagine a time when men became the weaker sex and that 61% of men felt that their status had deteriorated in relation to women. Many of the men interviewed said they were tired of feeling belittled, especially in advertising. One in two men felt less sure of himself than he used to: 71% were confused about how women wanted to be treated.

It’s very easy to say “aaah, diddums” in relation to the above, but to do so would be to ignore a serious problem. Men are confused and we made them that way with our weird mixed signals. What are you supposed to do if you’re a man? Hold the door open and risk having it slammed huffily in your face, or ignore the door and risk a tirade about manners? Give up your seat on the bus to the pregnant woman, or stay put in case the response is a rant about pregnancy not being an illness?

Should you behave in a sexually aggressive manner, as though women are the ball-breaking, hard-living types you learnt about in Sex and the City, or opt for a softer approach to what you may still consider to be a gentler gender?

It’s a minefield, not least because women themselves have become muddled about the answers. So nobody seems very happy. The question is: is anyone going to do anything about it or are we going to keep swallowing the same old nonsense about “rights” and “equality” and OAP mothers until we implode?

Of course, the man who prefers a gentler companion may look to the older lady: his mother-in-law, perhaps, with her knitting and her Irish stew and her reproaches to her daughter about getting the dinner on in time. And he may find himself oddly convulsed with longing, like David Walliams in Little Britain. Now, following a test case last week, a man is legally allowed to marry this paragon. Oh happy day!

Equally, a young lady may yearn for the pipe-smoking finesse of a man like her father-in-law. The test case that is changing the law featured just such a person. Given that we’re obsessed with youth, not to mention the horror of mothers-in-law, it’s all very startling. Are there are hundreds or thousands of men yearning to dump the missus and take up with her mum instead? All I can say is, who on earth are they?

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