Published on Friday, 20 June 2008 19:00 | 
A joke
between female scientists led to some ground-breaking research, explains Gale Berkowitz
The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic 'aha' moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA.
'There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded,' said Dr Klein, one of the scientists. 'When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something.'The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake: the fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health.
The UCLA study that followed suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause them to make and maintain friendships with other women. It's a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research – most of it on men – upside down.
Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioural repertoire than just fight or flight; 'In fact,' said Dr Klein, 'it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is released as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead.'
It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages women to care for children and hang out with other women, but the 'tend and befriend' notion developed by Drs Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men.