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

Revision as of 19:26, 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 are more likely to live longer than men? What is the reason has this advantage gotten larger as time passes? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to support an informed conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; However, we're not sure what the contribution of each one of these factors is.

We know that women live longer than males, regardless of weight. However, صبغ الشعر بالاسود this is not due to the fact that certain non-biological factors have changed. What are these changing 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 men and women. We can see that all countries are over the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl from every country could be expected to live for longer than her brother.

This chart shows that, although there is a women's advantage throughout the world, the differences between countries can be significant. In Russia, women live 10 years more than males. In Bhutan, the difference is just half a year.

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In rich countries the longevity advantage for women was smaller
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two things stand out.

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

And second, there is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very modest, but it grew substantially over the last century.

Using the option 'Change country by country' in the chart, you can verify that these two points apply to other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.