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

Revision as of 17:14, 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 reason why women have a longer life span than men? Why does this benefit increase in the past? The evidence isn't conclusive and we have only partial answers. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; However, we're not sure how strong the relative contribution of each of these factors is.

In spite of the weight, we know that a large portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men and not in the past, is to have to do with the fact that certain 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. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal parity line ; which means that in every country a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that, while the advantage for women is present everywhere, difference between countries is huge. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the difference is less than half a calendar year.

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The female advantage in life expectancy was smaller in rich countries than it is today.
We will now examine how the female advantage in longevity has changed with time. The chart below illustrates the men and women's life expectancies when they were born in the US between 1790-2014. Two things stand out.

There is an upward trend. Men as well as women in the US live much, much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, the gap is getting wider: العاب زوجية - pop over here - Although the advantage of women in life expectancy was once extremely small It has significantly increased in the past.

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