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

Revision as of 03:48, 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. Why do women live so more than men do today and why has this advantage increased over time? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to draw an unambiguous conclusion. We know there are biological, psychological, and environmental factors that play an integral role in women's longevity more than males, it isn't clear how much each factor contributes.

We are aware that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. However this isn't because of certain non-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. 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, ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور 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. As we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line - which means that in every country baby girls can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

It is interesting to note that the advantage of women is present everywhere, global differences are significant. In Russia women are 10 years older than males; while in Bhutan the difference is just half a year.

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In wealthy countries, the female advantage in longevity was previously smaller.
We will now examine how the female advantage in longevity has changed over time. The next chart compares the life expectancy of males and females when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two aspects stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both men and women in the US live a lot, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be very modest however it increased dramatically over the course of the last century.

It is possible to verify that these are applicable to other countries that have data by clicking on the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور and Sweden.