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 have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? There is only limited evidence and the evidence isn’t sufficient to reach an informed conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer lives than men, كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام however, we aren’t sure how much the influence of each of these factors is.
In spite of how much weight, we know that at a minimum, the reason women live longer than men do today and not in the past, has to have to do with the fact that certain key non-biological factors have changed. What are these factors that have changed? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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. We can see that all countries are over the line of parity diagonally. This means that a newborn girl from every country could be expected to live for longer than her brother.
It is interesting to note that although the female advantage exists everywhere, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women have a longer life span than men; in Bhutan the difference is just half an hour.
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The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in the richer countries that it is today.
Let’s examine how the advantage of women in longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the birth in the US between 1790 to 2014. Two distinct points stand out.
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 ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be very modest however, it has increased significantly in the past century.
By selecting ‘Change Country’ on the chart, determine if these two points also apply to the other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.
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Why do women have longer lives than men? 4 years ago