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’s the main reason women live longer than men? Why does this benefit increase as time passes? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to draw a definitive conclusion. We know there are behavioral, biological and environmental factors which all play a part in women living longer than men, we don’t know what percentage each factor plays in.
We have learned that women are living longer than men, regardless of weight. However this is not due to the fact that certain non-biological factors have changed. These variables are evolving. 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. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal parity line ; this means that in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1
Interestingly, this chart shows that while the female advantage exists everywhere, صبغ الشعر بالاسود the global differences are significant. In Russia, women live 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan, the difference is only half a year.
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In rich countries the longevity advantage for women was smaller
Let’s now look at how the gender advantage in longevity has changed with time. The next chart plots male and female life expectancies at birth in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two areas stand out.
The first is that there is an upward trend. Women and men in the United States live longer than they were 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
The second is that there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be extremely small but it increased substantially over the course of the last century.
When you click on the option “Change country by country’ in the chart, you can determine if these two points are applicable to the other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.
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Kermit Bindon created the group
Why do women live longer than men? 4 years ago