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

Revision as of 18:17, 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 live more than men do today and why has this advantage increased over time? There is only limited evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to support an unambiguous conclusion. We know there are behavioral, biological, and environmental factors which play a significant role in women who live longer than men, we do not know how much each one contributes.

In spite of how much weight, we know that at least a portion of the reason why women live longer than men, but not previously, has to have to do with the fact that some significant non-biological elements have changed. These variables are evolving. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Certain 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 we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line , this means in all countries baby girls can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that, ابر التخسيس while the advantage for women exists everywhere, the difference between countries is huge. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than males; while in Bhutan the difference is less than half each year.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was smaller in developed countries than it is now.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below shows men and women's life expectancies when they were born in the US during the period 1790 until 2014. Two aspects stand out.

First, there's an upward trend. Men and women in the US live much, 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 terms of life expectancy used be quite small but it increased substantially in the past century.

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