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

Revision as of 17:18, 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. Why do women live so much longer than men today and how has this advantage increased in the past? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn't sufficient to draw an unambiguous conclusion. We know that behavioral, ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we aren't sure what the contribution of each one of these factors is.

In spite of the precise amount, we can say that at a minimum, the reason women live longer than men in the present and not previously, has to do with the fact that certain key non-biological factors have changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are others that are more intricate. 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. It is clear that all countries are over the diagonal line of parity. This means that a newborn girl in all countries can anticipate to live longer than her brother.

Interestingly, this chart shows that the advantage of women exists across all countries, the global differences are significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men, while in Bhutan the gap is less than half a year.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was less in the richer countries than it is today.
We will now examine the way that female advantages in longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy when they were born in the US in the years 1790 to 2014. Two specific points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Women and men in America live longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very modest however it increased dramatically over the last century.

It is possible to verify that these principles are also applicable to other countries with information by clicking on the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور Sweden.