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 why has this advantage increased in the past? The evidence is sketchy and we only have limited solutions. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, However, we’re not sure how much the influence of each of these factors is.
We have learned that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. But, this is not due to the fact that certain 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. Other are more complicated. For example, كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور 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 line of parity – which means that in every country baby girls can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1
The chart below shows that although there is a women’s advantage across all countries, differences between countries can be significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men, while in Bhutan the difference is just half each year.
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In rich countries the female advantage in longevity was not as great.
Let’s look at how female longevity advantage has changed over time. The following chart shows the male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US between 1790-2014. Two things stand out.
First, there is an upward trend: Men as well as women in the US live much, كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
The gap is growing: Although the female advantage in terms of life expectancy was tiny, it has increased substantially with time.
Using the option ‘Change country’ on the chart, verify that these two points are applicable to other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.
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Rafael Keats created the group
Why do women have longer lives than men? 4 years ago