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

Revision as of 03:01, 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 is the reason women live longer than men in the present and how has this advantage increased over time? There is only limited evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to reach an absolute conclusion. While we are aware that there are behavioral, biological and environmental variables that all play a role in women who live longer than men, we don't know what percentage each factor plays in.

In spite of how much weight, we know that a large portion of the reason women live so much longer than men, but not in the past, has to be due to the fact that several key 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. Other are more complicated. For زيوت تطويل الشعر 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 زيوت تطويل الشعر 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 we can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line , which means that in every country baby girls can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

This graph 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 only half a year.

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The advantage women had in terms of life expectancy was lower in developed countries as compared to the present.
We will now examine how the advantage of women in longevity has changed with time. The following chart shows male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two aspects stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend: Men and women in the US have a much longer life span longer than they did a century 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 to be very modest however, it has increased significantly during the last century.

It is possible to verify that these principles are also applicable to other countries that have data by clicking on the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.