Difference between revisions of "Why Do Women Have Longer Lives Than Men"

Revision as of 01:25, 9 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. What's the reason why women live longer than men? Why has this advantage gotten larger as time passes? The evidence isn't conclusive and we're only able to provide incomplete answers. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; but we don't know exactly how much the influence of each factor is.

We are aware that women are living longer than men, regardless of weight. However this is not because of certain 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 complicated. For example, 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. As you can see, اضيق وضعية للجماع every country is above the diagonal parity line - this means that in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart above shows that, while the advantage for women exists across all countries, the global differences are significant. In Russia women have a longer life span than men; in Bhutan the gap is just half a year.

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The advantage women had in terms of life expectancy was lower in rich countries as compared to the present.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below shows gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the time of birth in the US during the period 1790 to 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

First, there's an upward trend. and women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is a widening gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used be very small but it increased substantially over the last century.

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