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 makes women live much longer than men today and why have these advantages gotten bigger over time? The evidence is sketchy and we’re left with only limited answers. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer lives than men, but we don’t know exactly how much the influence of each of these factors is.
It is known that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. However this isn’t due to the fact that certain non-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. Others are more complex. 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 كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام 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
Interestingly, this chart shows that the advantage of women exists everywhere, the difference between countries is huge. In Russia, women live 10 years more than men. In Bhutan there is a difference of just half a year.
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The advantage of women in terms of life expectancy was lower in countries with higher incomes as compared to the present.
Let’s see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below shows gender-based and female-specific life expectancy when they were born in the US during the period 1790 until 2014. Two things stand out.
There is an upward trend. Men and women living in America are living longer than they used to 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
The gap is widening: While the female advantage in life expectancy was quite small however, it has grown significantly over time.
You can confirm that these are applicable to other countries that have 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 live longer than men? 4 years ago