Difference between revisions of "Why Do Women Live Longer Than Men"

Revision as of 09:25, 8 January 2022

Everywhere in the world women live longer than men - but this was not always the case. The available data from rich countries shows that women didn't live longer than men in the 19th century. Why do women live much longer than men today and why does this benefit increase over time? There is only limited evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to draw an informed conclusion. We know that behavioral, افضل كريم للشعر biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we aren't sure how strong the relative contribution of each one of these factors is.

In spite of the precise amount of weight, we are aware that a large portion of the reason women live so much longer than men do today, but not in the past, has to have to do with the fact that some fundamental non-biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others are more complex. For example, افضل كريم للشعر there is evidence that in rich countries the female advantage increased in part because infectious diseases used to affect women disproportionately a century ago, so advances in medicine that reduced the long-term health burden from infectious diseases, especially for survivors, ended up raising women's longevity disproportionately.

Everywhere in the world women tend to live longer than men
The first chart below shows life expectancy at birth for men and women. We can see that every country is above the diagonal parity line - this means in all countries baby girls can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

It is interesting to note that the advantage of women exists everywhere, the country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the difference is just half each year.

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In rich countries the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the men and women's life expectancies at the time of birth in the US between 1790-2014. Two distinct features stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Both men as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very small, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.

You can check if these principles are also applicable to other countries that have information by clicking on the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.