What’s the biggest single factor that puts you at risk for ignoring your health? Being a man.

Sociologist Lisa Wade, interviewed in New York Magazine, says that “some scholars argue that being male is the single strongest predictor of whether a person will take health risks.”

Men like risk it turns out. Most of them also hate putting lotion on their skin (too girly) and being afraid of things (not manly). They are also more likely to have outdoor jobs and do household tasks that involve being outside the house. Think lawn mowing and BBQ-ing. They also pay less attention to their skin and so don’t catch early warning signs.

Women, generally speaking, don’t mind lotions, do pay attention to changes in our skin, wear sunscreen to avoid premature aging and wrinkles, and often also wear make up year round that contains ingredients that protect skin from the sun.

Male socialization in this case leads to bad results for men. Women, thanks to a different set of gender norms, fare better.

This combination of factors is part of the explanation as to why men between the ages of 15 to 39 are more than twice as likely to die of melanoma than women of that age. According to the American Academy of Dermatology melanoma will kill 6,470 men this year — and half as many women.

The NY Mag, Why are men more likely to get skin cancer?

“Advocates and researchers are currently trying to figure out how to better get the message across to dudes that they really need to slather on the SPF, and last week Wade came across an unlikely solution: the marketing teams that create what Wade calls “pointlessly gendered products.”Usually, Wade writes about such products — like gendered packages of mixed nuts, glue sticks, and even vegetables — with a mixture of snark and incredulousness. But when she came across Banana Boat sunscreen for men last week, she couldn’t help but write a “reluctant defense” of the product.

“Sunscreen is a category of lotion and so putting on sunscreen is equivalent to admitting you’re the sun’s bitch,” she writes. “In fact, thanks in part to the stupid idea that lotion carries girl cooties, men are two to three times more likely to be diagnosed with skin cancer. So, fine, dudes, here’s some sunscreen for men. For christ’s sake.”

Maybe for my teen boys they need an Axe of the sunscreen world? I was amused to see they know have sunscreen especially for tattoos. See http://www.coppertone.com/products/speciality/tattoguard/spray.aspx  even though the Canadian Cancer Society says any full spectrum, high SPF sunscreen will do the trick. The “just for tattoos” stuff looks cooler and I’m sure ounce for ounce, it’s pricier. But whatever.

The sunscreen avoidance and skin cancer risk isn’t the only health problem men face.

National Public Radio: The Unsafe Sex: Should The World Invest More In Men’s Health?

“On average, men aren’t as healthy as women. Men don’t live as long, and they’re more likely to engage in risky behaviors, like smoking and drinking. But in the past decade, global health funding has focused heavily on women. Programs and policies for men have been “notably absent,” says Sarah Hawkes from the University of London’s Institute of Global Health.”

“It’s cool to be a man that smokes and drinks — who drives a fast motorbike, or fast cars,” she says. “If you were really serious about saving lives, you would spend money tackling unhealthy gender norms” that promote these risky behaviors.”

See also 10 bad health habits of men. The list includes the usual: smoking, drinking, fast food, not seeing a doctor regularly, stress, keeping everything bottled in.

Men lead shorter lives than women and some moral philosophers think we ought to be more concerned than we are about this inequality. There are a number of ways in which men’s lives lead to early deaths, stress, yes, but also death in war time, and dangerous jobs such as mining and construction. Men are disproportionately represented in the prison population as well.

(I’ve written a bit before about men’s health. See The unsafe sex where I address some of these arguments.)

When thinking about inequality moral philosophers like to divide up inequalities that are the result of circumstance and luck, from ones that follow from choice. We think individuals are responsible for inequalities that are their own choosing. Sure smokers die young, for example, but that’s a trade off they’ve made.

It’s tempting to put men’s deaths from sun related skin cancer that category.

“Don’t be an idiot! Just wear the damn sunscreen!”

That I can hear cry in my own voice is part of the reason that married men, or men with female partners anyway, live longer. They’re nagged into healthy habits and visit the doctor more often. Now I should say that the person I’m in the best position to nag on this front doesn’t need it, not where sunscreen is concerned. As the result of a scare in his twenties, after growing up a fair skinned, freckled redhead, racing sailboats on the ocean, he was an early adopter of hats, gloves, long sleeves, and serious sunscreen.

Maybe it’s that I’m now parenting teenage boys but I can see how strong gender role socialization is for boys. It’s okay to wear a helmet because “my parents are crazy when it comes helmets. They’ll ground me forever if I ride without one” but not okay to do it because you’re worried about hitting your head.

Note that when young women acquire unhealthy habits, dieting, for example, as a result of female socialization feminists aren’t so quick to dismiss it as a matter of individual choice. Feminists can, and should, take male gender role socialization just as seriously. Indeed, I think feminism offers the best explanation of some of the inequalities that hurt men.