Difference between revisions of "Why Do Women Live Longer Than Men"

Revision as of 16:12, 11 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 reason why women have a longer life span than men? And how does this benefit increase over time? There isn't much evidence and we're only able to provide some answers. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer lives than men, However, we're not sure how strong the relative contribution of each of these factors is.

We are aware that women live longer than males, regardless of weight. But, this is not because of certain biological or 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 افضل كريم للشعر women. As you can see, all countries are above the diagonal line of parity - this means that in all countries that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart above shows that while the female advantage exists in all countries, difference between countries is huge. In Russia women live 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan, the difference is less than half a calendar year.

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In the richer countries, the longevity advantage for women used to be smaller
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the men and women's life expectancies when they were born in the US between 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Men and women in the United States live longer than they used to 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used be very modest, but it grew substantially during the last century.

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