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

Revision as of 08:26, 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. Why do women live much longer than men today and how does this benefit increase over time? The evidence isn't conclusive and we're only able to provide some answers. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, However, we're not sure how much the influence to each of these variables is.

In spite of the amount, we can say that at a minimum, the reason why women live so much longer than men and not previously, is to have to do with the fact that several key non-biological factors have changed. What are these factors that have changed? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, اضيق وضعية للجماع like the fact that men smoke more often. Other are more complicated. For example, اضيق وضعية للجماع 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 parity line ; this means in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

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

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In wealthy countries, the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US in the years 1790 to 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

There is an upward trend. Women and men in America live longer than they were 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be very small however, it has increased significantly in the past century.

You can check if the points you've listed are applicable to other countries that have information by clicking on the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.