Why Do Women Live Longer Than Men

From ScenarioThinking
Revision as of 02:37, 11 November 2021 by VMWMarti2749 (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 reason why women are more likely to live longer than men? And how does this benefit increase as time passes? There is only limited evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to draw an informed conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, ابر التخسيس but we don't know exactly how significant the impact to each of these variables is.

In spite of the number of pounds, we know that at least part of the reason why women live longer than men, but not previously, is to relate to the fact that a number of important non-biological aspects have changed. The factors changing are numerous. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are other issues that are more intricate. 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 - this means that in all countries that a baby girl can be expected to live for longer than a new boy.1

It is interesting to note that, while the advantage for women exists across all countries, the global differences are significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the difference is less than half an hour.

__S.17__
__S.19__
The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in the richer countries that it is today.
Let's look at how the female advantage in longevity has changed over time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancy at birth in the US during the period 1790 until 2014. Two specific points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both men as well as 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.

There is an increasing gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used to be quite small but it increased substantially in the past century.

If you select the option "Change country by country' in the chart, you are able to verify that these two points apply to the other countries having available information: Sweden, France and the UK.