Why do women live longer than men?
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 more than men do today and how is this difference growing over time? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn’t sufficient to support an absolute conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; however, we aren’t sure how significant the impact of each factor is.
Independently of the exact amount, we can say that at least part of the reason women live so much longer than men today and not in the past, has to have to do with the fact that several significant non-biological elements have changed. The factors changing are numerous. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Other are more complicated. 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. It is clear that all countries are over the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl from any country can expect to live longer than her brothers.
This chart illustrates that, although there is a women’s advantage in all countries, the differences across countries are often significant. In Russia, women live 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the gap is just half a year.
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The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in countries with higher incomes than it is now.
We will now examine how the advantage of women in terms of 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 specific points stand موقع تزويد مشتركين out.
The first is that there is an upward trend. Both genders in the United States live longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
Second, there’s an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used be quite small however, it has increased significantly over the last century.
You can check if these points are also applicable to other countries that have data by selecting the “Change country” option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.
