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

Revision as of 22:12, 13 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 makes women live longer than men in the present and why has this advantage increased over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn't sufficient to support an absolute conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer lives than men, تحاميل مهبلية however, we do not know what the contribution of each of these factors is.

We know that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. However, this is not because of certain biological factors have changed. These variables are evolving. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, 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. As we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line - it means that in all nations baby girls can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

This graph shows that although there is a women's advantage everywhere, cross-country differences could be significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the difference is just half each year.

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The female advantage in terms of life expectancy was lower in countries with higher incomes that it is today.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the male and female life expectancy at the time of birth in the US in the years 1790-2014. Two aspects stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women in America have longer lives than they used to 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used to be very modest but it increased substantially in the past century.

If you select the option "Change country' on the chart, determine if these two points are applicable to other countries that have available information: Sweden, France and the UK.