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

Revision as of 17:29, 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 more than men do today and why have these advantages gotten bigger over time? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't strong enough to make an absolute conclusion. While we are aware that there are biological, psychological and environmental factors which all play a part in women who live longer than males, we aren't sure how much each one contributes.

We are aware that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. However this isn't due to the fact that certain non-biological aspects have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Some 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 كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام men and women. We can see that every country is above the line of parity diagonally. This means that a newborn girl in every country can anticipate to live longer than her younger brother.

The chart above shows that the advantage of women exists across all countries, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women live 10 years more than males. In Bhutan the gap is less than half a calendar year.

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The advantage women had in terms of life expectancy was lower in the richer countries than it is now.
Let's now look at how the female advantage in life expectancy has changed over time. The following chart shows the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the time of birth in the US between 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. as well as women in the US have a much longer life span longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be extremely small however it increased dramatically over the last century.

It is possible to verify that the points you've listed are applicable to other countries that have data by selecting the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.