Are there any gender differences in frequency of vomiting?
A. Are there ever! In the survey of non-emetophobics, women reported having vomited 4.9 times on average in the past year, while for men the figure was only 1.4 times. The women said a typical year for them is 1.49 illnesses causing vomiting on average while men reported .9 such illnesses. All of the measures find women vomiting more often than men. The median woman most recently vomited 155 days ago; for the median man, it was 189 days. The differences in the average are even more striking. The average woman most recently vomited just over two years ago while for the average man, it was almost four years. This suggests that being a “non-vomiter” (never or rarely vomiting) is much more common for men than for women. (Bear in mind that emetophobics are excluded from these calculations. Nearly all of them are non-vomiters, and there are more women among them than men.) The average woman claimed to have vomited 93 times in her life, which divided by age works out to 3.1 times per year. Th
