Difference between revisions of "Why Are Women Living Longer Than Men"

Revision as of 18:07, 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 only have a few clues and the evidence is not strong enough to make an absolute conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, but we don't know exactly how strong the relative contribution of each one of these factors is.

In spite of how much weight, we know that at a minimum, the reason why women live longer than men, but not in the past, has to be due to the fact that a number of fundamental non-biological factors have changed. These factors 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, every country is above the diagonal parity line , this means in all countries that a baby girl can be expected to live for longer than a new boy.1

This chart illustrates that, although women have an advantage in all countries, the differences across countries can be significant. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan, the difference is only half a year.

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In countries with high incomes, the advantage of women in longevity was not as great.
We will now examine how the advantage of women in longevity has changed with time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancies at the birth in the US in the years 1790 until 2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. as well as 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.

Second, the gap is growing: Although the female advantage in life expectancy used to be quite small but it has risen significantly over time.

You can confirm that these are applicable to other countries that have data by clicking the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, اضيق وضعية للجماع France, and Sweden.