Difference between revisions of "Why Do Women Have Longer Lives Than Men"

Revision as of 17:14, 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 is the reason women are more likely to live longer than men? And why the advantage has grown in the past? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn't strong enough to make a definitive conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we aren't sure how significant the impact of each of these factors is.

We know that women are living longer than males, regardless of weight. However this isn't because of certain biological factors have changed. These are the factors that are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, اضيق وضعية للجماع like the fact that men smoke more often. Other 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. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl in all countries can anticipate to live longer than her younger brother.

This graph shows that while there is a female advantage in all countries, the differences across countries are often significant. In Russia women are 10 years older than men, while in Bhutan the difference is less than half an hour.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was much lower in rich countries than it is today.
Let's examine how the advantage of women in life expectancy has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the male and female life expectancies at the birth in the US during the period 1790 to 2014. Two aspects stand out.

First, there's an upward trend: Men and women in the US are living much, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be quite small, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.

You can verify that these points 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.