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

Revision as of 02:11, 14 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? What is the reason has this advantage gotten larger in the past? There is only limited evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to draw a definitive conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, اضيق وضعية للجماع biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer lives than men, but we don't know exactly how much the influence of each of these factors is.

In spite of how much weight, we know that a large portion of the reason why women live longer than men and not previously, is to relate to the fact that certain 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. There are others that are more intricate. For اضيق وضعية للجماع 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 ; it means that in all nations the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a newborn boy.1

It is interesting to note that although the female advantage exists across all countries, the country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the difference is less than half one year.

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In rich countries the female advantage in longevity was not as great.
Let's look at how the female advantage in terms of longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the life expectancy of males and females when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.

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

And second, there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be very small, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.

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