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 longer than men in the present, and why have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? The evidence is limited and we’re left with only incomplete solutions. While we are aware that there are biological, psychological as well as environmental factors which all play a part in women who live longer than men, we don’t know what percentage each factor plays in.
In spite of the precise amount, we can say that at a minimum, the reason women live so much longer than men do today but not in the past, has to be due to the fact that several key non-biological factors have changed. These variables are evolving. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are others that are more intricate. For ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور 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, all countries are above the diagonal parity line , which means that in every country the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a newborn boy.1
This chart shows that, although there is a women’s advantage in all countries, the differences across countries are often significant. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the gap is less than half a calendar year.
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The advantage of women in life expectancy was smaller in countries with higher incomes as compared to the present.
Let’s look at how the advantage of women in terms of longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the male and female life expectancies 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 genders in America have longer lives than they used to a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
The gap is growing: Although the advantage of women in life expectancy was once extremely small however, it has grown significantly with time.
When you click on the option “Change country by country’ in the chart, you will be able to check that these two points are applicable to other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.
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Why are women living longer than men? 4 years ago