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

Revision as of 15:08, 11 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? And why does this benefit increase in the past? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence is not strong enough to make an unambiguous conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; however, we aren't sure how significant the impact of each factor is.

We have learned that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. However it is not due to the fact that certain biological factors have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others are more complex. For example, كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور 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 line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl from every country could anticipate to live longer than her brothers.

This chart illustrates that, although women have an advantage across all countries, differences between countries can be substantial. In Russia women live 10 years longer than males; while in Bhutan the gap is less than half one year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was much lower in countries with higher incomes than it is today.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at birth in the US in the years 1790 to 2014. Two areas stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both genders in America have longer lives than they were a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in life expectancy used to be very small but it increased substantially over the course of the last century.

Using the option 'Change country from the chart, determine if these two points are applicable to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.