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

Revision as of 10:27, 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 makes women live longer than men and how is this difference growing over time? There is only limited evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to support an informed conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; but we don't know exactly how significant the impact of each factor is.

Independently of the exact number of pounds, we know that at a minimum, the reason women live so much longer than men in the present, but not previously, is to be due to the fact that certain significant non-biological elements have changed. The factors changing are numerous. 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, so advances in medicine that reduced the long-term health burden from infectious diseases, especially for survivors, كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام 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 parity line ; which means that in every country a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart above shows that the advantage of women exists everywhere, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the difference is just half one year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was smaller in developed countries than it is now.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart compares the life expectancy of males and females at birth in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend: Men and women in the US live a lot, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The gap is getting wider: Although the advantage of women in life expectancy was very small, it has increased substantially over time.

When you click on the option "Change country by country' in the chart, determine if these two points are applicable to other countries that have available information: Sweden, France and the UK.