Why Do Women Live Longer Than Men

From ScenarioThinking
Revision as of 17:09, 4 November 2021 by NigelPedley1424 (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

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 are more likely to live longer than men? Why has this advantage gotten larger as time passes? The evidence is limited and we have only limited solutions. We know that behavioral, ابر التخسيس biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, however, we aren't sure how strong the relative contribution of each factor is.

In spite of how much amount of weight, we are aware that at least part of the reason women live longer than men in the present however not as in the past, is to have to do with the fact that certain fundamental 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, 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, every country is above the diagonal parity line ; which means that in every country baby girls can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that the advantage of women exists in all countries, country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women have a longer life span than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half each year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
The advantage for women in terms of life expectancy was lower in rich countries than it is today.
Let's now look at how the female advantage in longevity has changed over time. The next chart compares male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two things stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Both genders living in America are living longer than they used to a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The gap is increasing: ابر التخسيس While the advantage of women in terms of life expectancy was quite small It has significantly increased with time.

You can check if these points are also applicable to other countries that have data by clicking the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.