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 is the reason women have a longer life span than men? What is the reason the advantage has grown in the past? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn’t sufficient to reach an absolute conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, However, we’re not sure how significant the impact of each one of these factors is.
In spite of the weight, we know that at least a portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men today and not in the past, is to be due to the fact that a number of key non-biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and ابر التخسيس 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. We can see that every country is over the line of parity diagonally. This means that a newborn girl in every country can be expected to live for longer than her younger brother.
This chart illustrates that, although there is a women’s advantage in all countries, the differences across countries can be significant. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the difference is less that half a year.
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The advantage women had in life expectancy was smaller in rich countries than it is today.
Let’s look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart plots the male and female lifespans when they were born in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct features stand out.
The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women in America live longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
The gap is increasing: While the advantage of women in life expectancy was once quite small however, it has grown significantly over time.
You can verify that these are applicable to other countries with data by clicking the “Change country” option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.
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Isabel Pratten created the group
Why do women have longer lives than men? 4 years ago