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

Revision as of 14:14, 10 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 main reason women have a longer life span than men? Why the advantage has grown as time passes? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to draw a definitive conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, However, we're not sure what the contribution of each of these factors is.

In spite of the amount, we can say that a large portion of the reason women live longer than men do today and not in the past, has to relate to the fact that several fundamental non-biological factors have changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others are more complex. For example, تحاميل مهبلية 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, تحاميل مهبلية 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. It is clear that every country is over the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl from any country can be expected to live for longer than her brothers.

This chart illustrates that, although women have an advantage throughout the world, the differences between countries can be significant. In Russia women have a longer life span than men. In Bhutan the difference is less than half each year.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was smaller in the richer countries than it is today.
Let's now look at the way that female advantages in terms of longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the birth in the US during the period 1790 to 2014. Two specific points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend: Men as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be quite small but it increased substantially over the course of the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country from the chart, check that these two points also apply to other countries that have available information: Sweden, France and the UK.