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 reason why women are more likely to live longer than men? And how has this advantage gotten larger as time passes? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn’t sufficient to draw an unambiguous conclusion. While we are aware that there are biological, behavioral and كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام environmental variables that all play a role in women who live longer than men, we don’t know the extent to which each factor plays a role.
Independently of the exact amount, we can say that at least a portion of the reason women live so much longer than men do today and not in the past, has to be due to the fact that a number of key non-biological factors have changed. These factors are changing. Some are well known and 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 above the diagonal parity line , this means in all countries that a baby girl can be expected to live for longer than a new boy.1
It is interesting to note that, while the advantage for women is present everywhere, cross-country differences are large. In Russia women have a longer life span than men. In Bhutan the difference is just half one year.
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In the richer countries, the female advantage in longevity was previously smaller.
Let’s now look at the way that female advantages in life expectancy has changed over time. The next chart plots male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct points stand out.
There is an upward trend. Both men as well as women in the US live much, much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
There is a widening gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used be quite small but it increased substantially over the last century.
By selecting ‘Change Country by country’ in the chart, you are able to determine if these two points are also applicable to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.
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Why do women live longer than men? 4 years ago