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

Revision as of 23:47, 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 main reason women are more likely to live longer than men? And why does this benefit increase as time passes? We only have partial evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to support an unambiguous conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer lives than men, However, we're not sure what the contribution to each of these variables is.

Independently of the exact amount of weight, we are aware that at least part of the reason why women live longer than men today, but not in the past, is to do with the fact that some important non-biological aspects have changed. These factors are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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. We can see that all countries are over the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl from every country could anticipate to live longer than her brother.

The chart below shows that while there is a female advantage everywhere, ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور cross-country differences can be substantial. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than males; while in Bhutan the difference is less than half a year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in countries with higher incomes than it is today.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend: Men as well as 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.

Second, the gap is getting wider: Although the advantage of women in life expectancy was extremely small It has significantly increased with time.

When you click on the option "Change country from the chart, you are able to verify that these two points are also applicable to other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.