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

Revision as of 17:51, 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 is the reason women have a longer life span than men? And why the advantage has grown over time? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to support an informed conclusion. We know there are biological, behavioral and علامات الحمل بولد environmental variables which all play a part in women who live longer than males, we aren't sure how much each one contributes.

In spite of how much amount of weight, we are aware that at a minimum, the reason why women live longer than men do today however not as in the past, has to do with the fact that several key non-biological factors have changed. What are these factors that have changed? 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. We can see that every country is above the diagonal line of parity. This means that a newborn girl from every country could anticipate to live longer than her brother.

The chart above shows that, while the advantage for women exists across all countries, the country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women have a longer life span than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half an hour.

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In rich countries the longevity advantage for women used to be smaller
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart shows the male and female lifespans at birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two distinct points stand علامات الحمل بولد (glorynote.com) out.

First, there's an upward trend: Men and women in the US have a much longer life span longer than they did 100 years 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 terms of life expectancy used to be very small but it increased substantially over the course of the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country by country' in the chart, you will be able to confirm that the two points are also applicable to other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.