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

Revision as of 23:59, 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 in the present and why does this benefit increase over time? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to reach an absolute conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we aren't sure how strong the relative contribution to each of these variables is.

In spite of the weight, we know that a large portion of the reason why women live longer than men today, but not in the past, is to do with the fact that several important non-biological aspects have changed. These 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 كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور men and women. As we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line ; this means that in all countries baby girls can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that, while the advantage for women exists in all countries, difference between countries is huge. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men; in Bhutan the gap is less than half one year.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was smaller in the richer countries than it is today.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below shows gender-based and female-specific life expectancy when they were born in the US in the years 1790 to 2014. Two areas stand out.

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

There is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be extremely small however it increased dramatically during the last century.

It is possible to verify that these points 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.