The first thing is that the paper cited in this article to back up this claim actually does not say that females have a higher rate of attempting suicide, but rather that they have a higher rate of deliberate self-harm. These two things are not equivalent.
The second factor to consider is the availability and accuracy of self-harm or suicide attempt statistics. Males are far less likely to seek professional help, as noted in the article, so it stands to reason that far more male suicide attempts and actions of deliberate self harm go unreported, even if this data is gathered independently, as males are in general less likely to share such things.
Suicide attempts are often unsuccessful. It's harder to complete than is the general belief. Success rates are something like 5%. If we were to assume that the base incidence rate of suicide attempts for males and females was the same, we would still expect more men to die by suicide because of the related statistics about seeking help/treatment. I'm not saying that the base levels are the same, I'm just giving a hypothetical to show how the variables interact.
This is not a simple picture. The personal and cultural stigma around suicide makes things like this very difficult to untangle.
I went though my desk drawers, etc. I found some pills, maybe decongestants, and decided that would probably not kill me. I found an exacto knife in my art supplies and decided to cut my wrist with it. I failed to hit a major artery. There was very little blood.
In contrast, I believe my brother's room had a gun, a bow and an encyclopedia of true crime. Had he attempted suicide while locked in his room, there would have been dramatically greater access to effective means and useful information for actually ending up dead.
I will suggest that women generally have less access to effective means, generally have less exposure to subjects relevant to figuring out how to end a life, and that women are typically subjected to a greater amount of social control that limits their ability to act.
Men are more likely to be infantrymen, police officers, hunt as a hobby, etc. Thus, they are just more likely to know how to kill something.
Additionally, successful suicides occur when you are alone. Men seem to have more opportunities to actually be alone, an observation I made years ago on a different forum about a different subject.
Women typically make less money than men, so they are less likely to be able to afford a place of their own. They tend to have roommates. Following a divorce, women are more likely to get custody of the children. So, post divorce, men are more likely to be living alone, women are more likely to be living with kids.
Etc.
If you attempt suicide with other people at home, you need to keep it a secret. If they find out, they will stop you. Simply having other people around is a deterrent to succeeding. It is hard to very quietly, secretly off yourself.
So, I think one factor is that women are less likely to have sufficient privacy, for lack of a better word, to succeed.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/09/040920063537.h...
This is far from as clear as people think it is. Foragers - as we were for the vast majority of our evolutionary history as humans - don't have lots of kids. They usually keep on the move, and that means carrying children, until they are maybe 4 years old. Having a life-mate to help you carry a four year old probably helps a lot.
It remains that humans are the most monogamous animals alive, by a mile. Other pair-bonding animals, like pigeons, cheat a ton compared to humans. When you look at pair-bonding animals, it's often those where the males are crucial to the offspring's survival, and where raising offspring demands a lot of resources from the parents. Human children are unable to survive on their own until the age of ten, at the most optimistic. So both the evolutionary story and the observed facts in forager societies (and our own too, in many ways) suggest that fathers matter a lot.
> Historically, only half of men ever passed their genes on
If I recall that paper correctly, of the men living at a certain point in time, only half have descendants today, whereas almost all the women have. This difference, over thousands of years, may have arisen from very small differences adding up over the generations for all we know.
The office for national statistics has great data. It's particularly useful because they define what they mean.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
And we also have great data available under the Fingertips system. http://fingertips.phe.org.uk/profile-group/mental-health/pro...
I posit that many supposed gender differences are rooted in the different life experiences of the sexes:
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/princesses-d...
That is, they both have a bunch of pills or a rope lying around but that doesn't mean they both choose them.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdea...
EDIT - Further down in the article, the most common methods noted in the UK are hanging and poison.
While I don't have a link, it is often reported that women are more likely to use poison/overdose for suicide attempts in the U.S. - it is a reasonable to assume it is the same case in the UK.
There's some other stuff going on too.
Possibly women have better social support networks; they're possibly better than men at asking for help and talking about the problems they're having. (This is one reason people keep banging on about getting men to talk).
Possibly women find it easier to get psychiatric help. Men tend to see doctors less often, and tend not to talk about some subjects when they're there. Women see doctors more often, and talk about emotions more readily.
Men are more vulnerable to some "triggers" -- relationship breakdown (partly because they sometimes lose contact with children and for the social network stuff mentioned above) or loss of job.
Yes, it's a data point of a handful, but I am thoroughly convinced that women are generally way too self protective to actually commit suicide. Now if a woman does actually do it.... She was seriously gone.
I've never known a suicidal man, does not mean they don't exist, just that they don't talk about it.
No they are not. You answered your own question. Women are more likely to use non-violent methods, men are more likely to use violent methods. Violent methods are more likely to kill the victim, therefore more men die by suicide as a percentage overall.
Now your question becomes. Why those methods? And the answer I believe is not social signalling. Or at least it is not the main factor. I believe the answer is to do with aggression (being higher in men than women due to testosterone) and the unwillingness to cause disfigurement (because of social reasons). Source, I read a scientific book on it.
Why is this? I've read before that modes of suicide tend to be gendered -- ie, gunshots to the head for men and overdoses for women. Is this the entire story? Are women more likely, consciously or unconsciously, to be social signaling for support than men when they attempt suicide?
I lost my brother to suicide three years ago. I began attending counseling this year after a protracted period of personal turmoil in its aftermath, and it's a topic I spend a lot of thought on. When I was younger and less psychologically moored I thought of suicide as the ultimate lever I could wield over my own fate. Not so much these days, though.