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

Revision as of 21:24, 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 have a longer life span than men? Why the advantage has grown in the past? The evidence is sketchy and we have only incomplete solutions. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we do not know how much the influence of each of these factors is.

In spite of the number of pounds, we know that at least part of the reason women live so much longer than men, but not previously, is to do with the fact that some important non-biological aspects have changed. What are these factors that have changed? 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, 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 you can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line , this means that in all countries baby girls can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

The chart below shows that while there is a female advantage everywhere, cross-country differences can be significant. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is less that half a year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
In wealthy countries, the women's advantage in longevity was previously smaller.
Let's now look at how the female advantage in life expectancy has changed over time. The next chart compares the life expectancy of males and ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور females at birth in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women in America live longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very small, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country from the chart, determine if these two points are applicable to other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.