Why Do Women Live Longer Than Men

Fra Enneawiki
Spring til navigation Spring til søgning

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 more than men do today and why have these advantages gotten bigger over time? The evidence isn't conclusive and we're left with only incomplete answers. While we are aware that there are biological, psychological and environmental variables that play an integral role in women who live longer than men, we do not know the extent to which each factor plays a role.

Independently of the exact amount of weight, we are aware that at least a portion of the reason women live so much longer than men, but not previously, has to be due to the fact that several fundamental non-biological factors have changed. These factors are changing. Some are well known and ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور 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. As we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line , this means that in all countries baby girls can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

The chart below shows that while there is a female advantage everywhere, cross-country differences can be substantial. In Russia women are 10 years older than males; while in Bhutan the difference is less than half a year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
The female advantage in terms of life expectancy was lower in countries with higher incomes than it is now.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart plots male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. as well as women in the US have a much longer life span longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be extremely small, but it grew substantially in the past century.

When you click on the option "Change country from the chart, you will be able to confirm that the two points are also applicable to the other countries having available information: Sweden, France and the UK.