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

Revision as of 16:48, 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 have a longer life span than men? What is the reason does this benefit increase as time passes? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn't sufficient to support an informed conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we aren't sure how much the influence of each one of these factors is.

We know that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. However this isn't due to the fact that certain non-biological aspects have changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are other issues 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. As you can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line - this means in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that while the female advantage exists everywhere, the difference between countries is huge. In Russia, women live 10 years more than males. In Bhutan, the difference is just half a year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
In the richer countries, the advantage of women in longevity used to be smaller
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart plots the male and female lifespans when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. and women in the US are living much, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is a widening gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used be quite small but it increased substantially during the last century.

It is possible to verify that these principles are also applicable to other countries with data by clicking on the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, اضيق وضعية للجماع and Sweden.