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

Revision as of 00:01, 10 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 so much longer than men today and how has this advantage increased over time? The evidence is limited and we're only able to provide partial solutions. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; However, we're not sure how significant the impact of each one of these factors is.

In spite of the precise weight, we know that a large portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men do today but not in the past, has to be due to the fact that some significant non-biological elements have changed. What are these factors that have changed? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are other issues that are more intricate. 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, صبغ الشعر بالاسود (learn here) 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 line of parity diagonally. This means that a newborn girl from any country can be expected to live for longer than her brother.

It is interesting to note that, while the advantage for women is present everywhere, global differences are significant. In Russia women are 10 years older than men; in Bhutan the difference is less than half a year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
In the richer countries, صبغ الشعر بالاسود the longevity advantage for women was smaller
We will now examine the way that female advantages in longevity has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy when they were born in the US in the years 1790 until 2014. Two points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend: Men and women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's a widening gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be extremely small but it increased substantially in the past century.

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