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

Revision as of 22:40, 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 reason women are more likely to live longer than men? Why has this advantage gotten larger over time? There is only limited evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to reach a definitive conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer lives than men, but we don't know exactly what the contribution of each one of these factors is.

We have learned that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. However this isn't because of certain non-biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور like the fact that men smoke more often. Some 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. As we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line - this means that in all countries that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a new boy.1

It is interesting to note that although the female advantage exists across all countries, ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور the cross-country differences are large. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is just half a year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was much lower in countries with higher incomes as compared to the present.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancies at birth in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two distinct features stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both genders in America have longer lives than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an increasing gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used to be very modest but it increased substantially during the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country' on the chart, you can verify that these two points apply to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.