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

Revision as of 18:47, 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 have a longer life span than men? What is the reason does this benefit increase as time passes? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to reach an absolute conclusion. While we are aware that there are biological, behavioral and environmental factors that all play a role in women living longer than men, we don't know how much each one contributes.

In spite of how much number of pounds, we know that a large portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men do today and العاب زوجية not in the past, has to relate to the fact that a number of fundamental non-biological factors have changed. What are these new 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 from every country could anticipate to live longer than her brothers.

This chart illustrates that, although there is a women's advantage across all countries, differences between countries are often significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men; in Bhutan the difference is just half an hour.

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The female advantage in life expectancy was much lower in the richer countries as compared to the present.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart shows the life expectancy of males and females when they were born in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Men and women in America have longer lives than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very small but it increased substantially during the last century.

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