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

Revision as of 13:32, 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. What's the reason women are more likely to live longer than men? And why does this benefit increase in the past? There isn't much evidence and we have only partial answers. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; However, we're not sure how significant the impact of each one of these factors is.

In spite of the number of pounds, we know that a large portion of the reason why women live longer than men do today, but not in the past, is to have to do with the fact that some key non-biological factors have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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, علامات الحمل بولد so advances in medicine that reduced the long-term health burden from infectious diseases, especially for علامات الحمل بولد 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 over the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl in all countries can anticipate to live longer than her brothers.

Interestingly, this chart shows that, while the advantage for women exists in all countries, country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men; in Bhutan the difference is less than half a year.

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In wealthy countries, the longevity advantage for women was previously smaller.
We will now examine how the gender advantage in longevity has changed with time. The chart below illustrates the male and female life expectancies at birth in the US in the years 1790 until 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used to be very modest however, it has increased significantly over the course of the last century.

You can verify that these principles 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.