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

Revision as of 16:40, 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 women live longer than men? And how does this benefit increase over time? There isn't much evidence and we have only incomplete answers. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; but we don't know exactly how significant the impact to each of these variables is.

In spite of how much weight, we know that a large portion of the reason women live so much longer than men today, زيوت تطويل الشعر (describes it) but not in the past, has to relate to the fact that certain significant non-biological elements have changed. What are these factors that have changed? Some are well known and 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. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal line of parity. This means that a newborn girl from any country can expect to live longer than her brothers.

This chart illustrates that, although women have an advantage across all countries, differences between countries are often significant. In Russia women are 10 years older than men; in Bhutan the gap is less than half each year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in countries with higher incomes as compared to the present.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy when they were born in the US during the period 1790 until 2014. Two aspects stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both men and women in the US have a much longer life span 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 an increasing gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used be extremely small however, it has increased significantly during the last century.

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