Step aside longevity bros. It’s time for the longevity ladies
A growing number of women scientists, entrepreneurs and influencers are edging into a space long dominated by men. Their study of hormones and ovaries could unlock the key to a longer life for everyone.
Jennifer Garrison, a 49-year-old neuroscientist, has been studying how ageing changes the way the brain communicates with the rest of the body in a lab she runs in Novato, California.
But on an afternoon in March, she walked across a glitzy Los Angeles stage to the pulsing soundtrack of Kelly Clarkson singing, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and greeted an audience of mainly high net-worth men gathered to hear about tech and longevity.
“What if I told you that understanding female bodies could actually help every single person on the planet live healthier longer?” she asked.
Garrison then directed the audience to watch a movie of a 3-D structure on a large screen behind her. She asked everyone to guess what it was. A brain, a heart, a liver, a thyroid, a stomach, people called out. No, no, no, no and no. “This is an ovary,” Garrison told them. She later added: “We call them the canary in the coal mine of ageing.”
Jamie Justice, a gerontologist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, says that an important predictor of longevity in both females and males is the age at which their mothers go through menopause, defined as a year without a menstrual cycle, which women experience on average at the age of 51.
If a mother goes through menopause late, she is more likely to live longer. So are her daughters, sons and brothers. Scientists say there are common genes involved, but they don’t yet know all of them.
“If we understand what is happening, we can unlock secrets about biological ageing in women and in men,” said Justice.
Breaking Into a Boys Club
Women have long dominated the wellness industry, with a focus on keeping the skin dewy and the limbs slender and pilates-toned. Women have also been major contributors to the science of ageing. The biologist Cynthia Kenyon helped to launch the field with her 1993 discovery that a single gene mutation doubled the lifespan of worms. Kenyon is now vice president of ageing research at Calico Life Sciences, a company focused on the biology of ageing.
Still, when it comes to longevity, particularly the high-profile, publicity-generating pursuit of lifespans extending to 100 and beyond, men have been the faces of the movement.
Software entrepreneur Bryan Johnson set up a Rejuvenation Olympics where people compete to see who has the slowest rate of ageing, as measured by a blood test. He was filmed receiving a transfusion of blood from his teenage son in the 2025 Netflix documentary about his quest for immortality, “Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever”.
Dr Peter Attia recommends that people approach ageing as a “centenarian decathlon”, training to enable abilities they want to keep past the age of 100, such as having sex or lifting a suitcase into the overhead compartment of a plane. His own list includes driving a race car close to the pace he does today and hiking with a 9kg backpack for an hour.
David Sinclair, a Harvard geneticist and serial longevity entrepreneur, regularly appears at conferences and on podcasts claiming scientists will soon be able to reverse ageing.
“So much of longevity has been this very individualistic focus on men,” said Dr Sara Szal, a gynaecologist, female hormone specialist and director of precision medicine at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health in Villanova, Pennsylvania. “The men got attention and funding. They made some progress. Women were left out of the longevity conversation.”
That is starting to change with the rise of an increasingly prominent group of female scientists, entrepreneurs and influencers. In a field dominated by “longevity bros,” they could be called the “longevity ladies”.
What these longevity ladies all address in varied ways is a mystery that continues to perplex the field. Women live longer than men, five years on average in the US. The female longevity advantage is found in every country where mortality data are collected, cuts across socio-economic groups and persists in hard times such as severe famines and epidemics, according to Dr Dena Dubal, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, who analysed data from other researchers.
Yet women also spend more years of their lives than men do in poorer health — and not simply because they are living longer. Women are at higher risk than men for hip fractures, Alzheimer’s disease, arthritis and a host of other problems common in old age.
Scientists aren’t yet sure why this health disparity exists. Some suggest it’s a consequence of the stress of caregiving, which falls disproportionately on women. Others wonder if menopause is to blame, because when ovaries stop releasing essential hormones it can speed up biological ageing in women.
The fact that so many of these questions remain unanswered may have something to do with the fact that women were historically excluded from most clinical trials at the National Institutes of Health, including trials on ageing. For example the NIH-sponsored Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Ageing, which launched in 1958, didn’t enrol women until 20 years later.
Researchers typically worried about including women of child-bearing age in trials owing to concerns that experiments could harm future children. Because female hormones fluctuate throughout a menstrual cycle, scientists agreed it was simpler to design studies without taking them into account, even when the subjects were mice. It wasn’t until 2016 that the NIH required researchers to use female mice, too.
Across medicine, “Researchers studied men, and doctors applied the results to women,” said Dr Louise Aronson, a geriatrician and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “It is better now for many things, but old habits die hard.”
Szal says that she tells female patients they can’t assume that what is popular with male longevity influencers will work for them. She noticed that low-carb diets caused menstrual irregularities and thyroid problems in some of her female patients. She also isn’t sure if women benefit as much as men from regularly tracking VO2 max, a measure of how well the body uses oxygen during intense exercise.
“We don’t know how many of the statistics, interpretations and conclusions apply to women,” Szal said.
Kayla Barnes-Lentz, 34, a longevity influencer, began seeking Szal’s guidance after they both spoke at a female longevity conference in Los Angeles earlier this year. Barnes-Lentz, who had her first date with her husband in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber at a longevity clinic she was running at the time, says Szal is helping her continue to adjust her nutrition, exercise and sleep depending on her menstrual cycle. As for her husband, she said his longevity routines don’t change much because, “he has a 24-hour hormone cycle”.
‘Longevity Is About Community’
The rise of the longevity ladies can be attributed to the convergence of two major changes. One is a broader cultural embrace of the role lifestyle choices, such as social connections and a good diet, can play in both enriching a life and lengthening it. These are areas where female voices have traditionally held sway.
Ella Davar, 37, a registered dietitian and nutritionist in Miami, launched in July 2024 the Global Longevity Association, a group that aims to promote healthy ageing and a longevity lifestyle. She first built a following by posting longevity foodie videos on YouTube and cooking healthy recipes on TV. She self-published cookbooks of easy-to-make recipes full of antioxidants and probiotics to promote gut health and reduce inflammation, such as broccoli bone-broth soup, red cabbage salad with walnuts and blueberries and her personal favourite, sauerkraut.
Davar started hosting longevity lunches and dinners in the homes of friends last year, explaining the benefits of everything she served to guests seated around a large table. As the popularity of these meals grew, so did their size. More recent events include a luncheon in April at Mar-a-Lago, where chefs served fish, olives and sauerkraut (President Trump was not there, she says).
At a luncheon at the White House Historical Association in May, where attendees snacked on crudités dipped in red-pepper hummus and avocado crostini, Davar urged guests to take turns sharing their own thoughts on longevity. Many opened up with deeply personal stories about their own illnesses and ageing relatives. Davar, who regularly tells people that no one should eat alone, told diners to start hosting their own longevity meals for friends and family. “Longevity is about community,” she said.
The other big driver in the rise of the longevity ladies is the emergence of scientific findings showing the role that sex differences play in the ageing process — and a growing belief that research on women might improve how ageing is understood and treated in men too.
Dubal, the neurologist at UCSF, says some clues about the female longevity advantage have come from studying the role of the X chromosome. Males have only one X chromosome, but females have two, one from each parent, though one of them remains dormant for much of a female’s lifetime.
In studies of mice, Dubal and her colleagues found that the silent X “wakes up” and makes proteins as the female mice age. In one experiment, they genetically engineered the brains of old male mice to make more of a protein that the awakening X makes in females. They found that learning and memory improved in the male mice.
She suspects that this late-in-life source of protein in females may contribute to longevity, though she still needs to prove it. “I am really optimistic that understanding the second X is going to be relevant for both males and females,” she said.
One of the challenges for developing anti-ageing therapies is that it takes a long time to assess whether something has worked or not in lengthening a human life. This is why scientists are increasingly conducting trials on ovaries, which age 2½ times faster than other tissue in the body. “Ovaries are a model of accelerated ageing,” said Dr Zev Williams, a fertility doctor and director of Columbia University Fertility Center.
Doctors at Columbia are testing low-dose rapamycin, a drug approved to prevent organ rejection in transplant patients, to see if it slows down ovarian ageing in a trial of women ages 35 to 45. Rapamycin has slowed down ovarian ageing in female mice and extended the lifespans of mice of both sexes.
Williams, a co-investigator on the trial, says that if it works, rapamycin might help delay menopause and reduce heart disease, stroke and dementia risks, although larger studies are needed.
Jamie Justice, the gerontologist, was tapped two years ago to run XPrize Healthspan, a competition with a $US101 million ($154m) purse, for which teams of scientists are trying to develop interventions to reverse muscle, cognitive and immune losses by at least 10 years in people between 50 and 80 years old. The teams have to run one-year trials with both male and female subjects. Winners will be announced in 2030.
Jennifer Garrison, who has been running a lab at the Buck Institute for Research on Ageing, co-led a team last year that pitched the winning idea for a new XPrize competition. The goal is for teams to develop a way to track changes in ovarian function throughout women’s lives, from pre-puberty to post-menopause. Garrison likes to call it “The Double X Prize.”
She explains that many women monitor their hormones when they want to get pregnant, but don’t realise ovaries are important to health at every age. For women in their 20s, for example, evidence of irregularities could be a sign of polycystic ovary syndrome, a condition that puts them at higher risk for infertility and heart disease. Garrison hopes the competition will lead to better ways to identify ovarian changes earlier to help head off related diseases.
Another main goal, she says, is to get people to stop thinking about ovaries as simply important for reproduction — or of concern only to women. “They are a proxy for what is driving ageing in everyone,” Garrison said.
It has never been easy to raise money for companies or projects focused on female health and longevity, says Justice, but within 30 minutes of announcing the Double X idea, the foundation raised $US1.2 million from people at the meeting for the prize.
“Many men there jumped on board and said this is the most important thing we can tackle,” Justice said. They plan to launch the competition in January with a purse of at least $US50 million, large enough to attract serious competitors.
The prize will debut at time when funding for research in women’s health — already relatively modest — is under threat from further cuts. “The research is vulnerable,” Garrison told the crowd at the March longevity and tech event. “I think that we are at a critical turning point.”
Garrison wants to make it as clear as possible that researching female bodies promises to benefit everyone. “Males have always been the baseline for longevity,” Garrison said. “Females should be.”
The Wall Street Journal
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