Do women 'over-report' morbidity? Men's and women's responses to structured prompting on a standard question on long standing illness

It is frequently observed in contemporary industrialised societies that alt hough women live longer than men, they are sicker than men in that they rep ort higher rates of morbidity, disability and health care use. One common e lement of the explanation for women's higher rates of morbidity is that the re are gender differences in the way that symptoms are perceived, evaluated and acted upon. It is widely assumed that women will be more ready to repo rt illness and to seek help and that they have greater flexibility in their lives to accommodate illness. The few studies that have examined men and w omen with the same conditions or symptoms are contradictory, but lend littl e support to this hypothesised greater propensity, yet it is still widely b elieved. Here we compare men's and women's answers to a global, commonly us ed question about chronic illness and to a series of more specific prompts and classify the conditions reported by an externally defined categorisatio n of severity and International Classification of Disease chapter. Contrary to the common expectation that women report higher rates of morbidity and are more ready to report mental health problems, we found: no gender differ ences in the initial reporting of conditions; men reported a higher proport ion of their conditions in response to the initial global question; and no evidence that women were more likely to report 'trivial' or mental health c onditions in response to the initial question. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Lt d. All rights reserved.