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

Revision as of 09:38, 11 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? And why does this benefit increase as time passes? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to support an informed conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we do not know what the contribution to each of these variables is.

Independently of the exact amount of weight, we are aware that a large portion of the reason women live so much longer than men in the present, but not previously, has to be due to the fact that certain significant non-biological elements have changed. The factors changing are numerous. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are others that are more intricate. 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 every country is above the diagonal line of parity - this means in all countries the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a new boy.1

This chart shows that, although women have an advantage everywhere, cross-country differences are often significant. In Russia women live 10 years more than males. In Bhutan the difference is only half a year.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was smaller in rich countries that it is today.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart plots male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women in the US live a lot, كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be quite small however, it has increased significantly over the course of the last century.

You can confirm that these points are also applicable to other countries that have information by clicking on the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.