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

Revision as of 10:02, 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 makes women live longer than men, and why is this difference growing over time? There is only limited evidence and علامات الحمل بولد the evidence is not sufficient to reach a definitive conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we do not know how much the influence of each factor is.

We are aware that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. However this isn't because of certain biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Certain 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 علامات الحمل بولد women. We can see that every country is above the diagonal parity line ; this means that in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that although the female advantage exists in all countries, difference between countries is huge. In Russia women live 10 years more than men. In Bhutan there is a difference of less than half a calendar year.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was much lower in the richer countries as compared to the present.
Let's examine the way that female advantages in life expectancy has changed over time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancies at birth in the US during the period 1790 to 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

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

Second, there's an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be quite small however, it has increased significantly over the last century.

If you select the option "Change country by country' in the chart, you can verify that these two points are applicable to other countries that have available information: Sweden, France and the UK.