Lesley Riddoch: We're paying price of 70s and 80s deprivation

Published on Wednesday 16 December 2009 20:51

SCOTLAND is fast becoming the Sick Woman of Europe – an unwelcome and puzzling bit of gender equality. Scotland's Chief Medical Officer reports that Scotsmen are now less likely to be smokers, obese or couch potatoes than Scotswomen.

As a result, the traditional gap in life expectancy between men and women is narrowing and lung cancer may soon be more common among women.

Why the change against all European trends? It's possible that appalling sub-east European health outcomes among women in Glasgow's deprived communities are skewing the overall Scottish statistics.

Obstetrician Dr Mary Hepburn has reported an increase in the number of malnourished mothers attending her clinic – and a drop in the number of drug-using mothers still alive ten years after their first birth. Life for women on Scotland's big, urban, drug-using estates is grindingly hard. And many grannies face a second motherhood in middle age because their own children are too drug- or alcohol-dependent to be responsible parents.

Harry Burns's comments, however, suggest there's a nationwide problem of women not heeding health messages – above all on cigarettes.

The main objective of most girls in our nominally equal, but actually macho society is to be slim and attractive to boys. Smoking, laxatives and bulimia are used as calculated aids in the endless battle for weight control.

Standing in a restaurant toilet queue lately, I heard two teenage girls calmly discuss the likelihood of being able to "chuck" their meals without everyone outside hearing.

And yet, young women aren't stupid. They just can't envisage a future where those extra 13 years of individual health will ever matter more than belonging to the crowd here and now – whatever that takes.

Scotland's obsession with football doesn't help. Girls don't value their own physical activity, because adult Scots don't.

Appearance has certainly become more important than action. And Scotland's drinking culture has been lapped up by girls, who see their right to get trashed as a perverse measure of gender equality. Perhaps life for young ladies is so boring and constrained in one walk of life, and so stressful and demanding in another, that getting drunk and behaving badly is the only way to escape the crushing boredom of low expectations.

But tempting as it is to blame ladette culture for the declining relative longevity of Scotswomen, it doesn't actually stack up.

It takes 30-40 years to develop lung cancer, so the premature deaths of today were the young smokers of the 1970s and 1980s. About that time, much of working life collapsed, courtesy of Margaret Thatcher, and a generation of men was famously made unemployed and unemployable.

Even though women appeared to fare better through those hard times – adapting to part-time and shift working – perhaps we are finally witnessing the price they have paid, attending to everyone else's needs before their own.