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

Revision as of 00:52, 13 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 live longer than men? What is the reason does this benefit increase as time passes? The evidence is sketchy and we have only partial solutions. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, however, we aren't sure how strong the relative contribution of each one of these factors is.

We are aware that women live longer than males, regardless of weight. However, this is not because of 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. Other are more complicated. For example, علامات الحمل بولد 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 - which means that in every country a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This graph shows that while there is a female advantage across all countries, differences between countries are often significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half a year.

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The advantage for women in terms of life expectancy was lower in developed countries as compared to the present.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the men and علامات الحمل بولد women's life expectancies at birth in the US between 1790 until 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Women and men in America have longer lives than they were 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The gap is widening: While the advantage of women in life expectancy was tiny, it has increased substantially with time.

If you select the option "Change country by country' in the chart, verify that these two points also apply to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.