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. Why do women live so much longer than men today and how has this advantage increased in the past? There is only limited evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to support an absolute conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, However, we’re not sure what the contribution of each one of these factors is.
We are aware that women live longer than males, regardless of weight. However it is not due to the fact that certain non-biological aspects have changed. What are these changing factors? 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. It is clear that every country is over the line of parity diagonally. This means that a newborn girl in every country can anticipate to live longer than her brothers.
It is interesting to note 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 gap is just half a year.
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The advantage for women in life expectancy was less in the richer countries than it is today.
We will now examine how the advantage of women in longevity has changed over time. The next chart compares male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two aspects stand out.
The first is that there is an upward trend: Men and العاب زوجية (simply click the up coming post) women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
And second, there is a widening gap: العاب زوجية The female advantage in life expectancy used to be very modest, but it grew substantially in the past century.
By selecting ‘Change Country by country’ in the chart, you will be able to determine if these two points are also applicable to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.
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Why women are more likely to live longer than men? 4 years ago