Difference between revisions of "Why Are Women Living Longer Than Men"

Revision as of 02:52, 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 reason why women live longer than men? What is the reason does this benefit increase in the past? We only have partial evidence and the evidence is not strong enough to make a definitive conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, but we don't know exactly how strong the relative contribution of each one of these factors is.

We know that women are living longer than males, regardless of weight. However this is not because of certain biological factors have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are others 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 we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line ; which means that in every country baby girls can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that, while the advantage for women is present everywhere, difference between countries is huge. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half a calendar year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
In countries with high incomes, the female advantage in longevity was smaller
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancy at birth in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two areas stand تحاميل مهبلية out.

There is an upward trend. Both genders 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.

There is a widening gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used be extremely small however it increased dramatically in the past century.

You can verify that these points are also applicable to other countries with data by clicking on the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.