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

Revision as of 06:38, 12 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 are more likely to live longer than men? And why has this advantage gotten larger in the past? We only have partial evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to support an unambiguous conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; however, we aren't sure how significant the impact to each of these variables is.

We are aware that women are living longer than men, regardless of weight. However this is not because of certain non-biological factors have changed. What are these factors that have changed? Some are well known and تحاميل مهبلية relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others are more complex. 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, every country is above the diagonal line of parity - this means that in all countries baby girls can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that the advantage of women is present everywhere, cross-country differences are large. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan there is a difference of less than half a calendar year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
The advantage of women in life expectancy was smaller in developed countries as compared to the present.
We will now examine how the gender advantage in longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at birth in the US from 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

There is an upward trend: Men and women in the US live much, much 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 getting wider: Although the advantage of women in life expectancy was once extremely small It has significantly increased with time.

It is possible to verify that these principles are also applicable to other countries with data by clicking on the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.