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

Revision as of 16:33, 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. Why do women live much longer than men today, and why has this advantage increased in the past? The evidence isn't conclusive and we only have some solutions. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; but we don't know exactly how much the influence of each of these factors is.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that at a minimum, the reason why women live longer than men in the present but not previously, has to do with the fact that several significant non-biological elements have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Some are more complex. For example, افضل كريم للشعر 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 افضل كريم للشعر (this hyperlink) men and women. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal parity line - this means that in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that although the female advantage is present everywhere, cross-country differences are large. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan, the difference is only half a year.

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In rich countries the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's look at the way that female advantages in life expectancy has changed over time. The next chart compares the life expectancy of males and females at birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two aspects stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both men and women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very small however, it has increased significantly during the last century.

You can check if these are applicable to other countries with data by selecting the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.