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

Revision as of 17:22, 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. Why do women live longer than men in the present, and why does this benefit increase in the past? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to reach an informed conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and تحاميل مهبلية environmental factors play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; however, we aren't sure how strong the relative contribution to each of these variables is.

Independently of the exact amount, we can say that at a minimum, the reason women live so much longer than men but not in the past, has to have to do with the fact that several key non-biological factors have changed. What are these factors that have changed? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Other 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, 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 ; this means that in all countries baby girls can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This graph shows that even though women enjoy an advantage everywhere, cross-country differences can be substantial. In Russia women live 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the gap is less that half a year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in the richer countries than it is today.
Let's now look at the way that female advantages in terms of longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the time of birth in the US in the years 1790 until 2014. Two specific points stand تحاميل مهبلية out.

There is an upward trend. Men 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.

There is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be extremely small however it increased dramatically during the last century.

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