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

Revision as of 04:25, 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 main reason women have a longer life span than men? And why does this benefit increase over time? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to support a definitive conclusion. While we are aware that there are biological, psychological and environmental variables that all play a role in the longevity of women over males, it isn't clear how much each factor contributes.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that at least a portion of the reason why women live longer than men do today and not previously, has to be due to the fact that certain important non-biological aspects have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Some are more complex. 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 every country is above the diagonal parity line ; this means in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

This chart shows that, while there is a female advantage across all countries, differences between countries are often significant. In Russia, women live 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the gap is just half a year.

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The advantage of women in life expectancy was less in rich countries that it is today.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart compares the life expectancy of males and افضل كريم للشعر (a fantastic read) females at birth in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

First, there's 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.

There is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used be very modest however, it has increased significantly over the last century.

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