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 women have a longer life span than men? And how is this difference growing as time passes? The evidence is limited and we only have partial solutions. While we are aware that there are biological, psychological as well as environmental factors which play a significant role in the longevity of women over men, we don’t know how much each one contributes.
We have learned that women are living longer than males, regardless of weight. But, this is not due to the fact that certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. These variables are evolving. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Some 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 men and women. As we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line ; which means that in every country a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a new boy.1
The chart above shows that while the female advantage exists across all countries, the country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women live 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the difference is less than half a calendar year.
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In rich countries the longevity advantage for women used to be smaller
Let’s examine how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US in the years 1790-2014. Two things stand out.
First, there’s an upward trend. Both men as well as women in the US live much, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
There is an increase in the gap between men and اوضاع الجماع [just click the up coming website] women: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be very modest, but it grew substantially in the past century.
Using the option ‘Change country in the chart, you will be able to verify that these two points also apply to the other countries having available information: Sweden, France and the UK.
