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 is the reason women are more likely to live longer than men? What is the reason the advantage has grown as time passes? There is only limited evidence and the evidence is not strong enough to make an unambiguous conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; however, we aren’t sure how significant the impact of each one of these factors is.
We know that women live longer than males, regardless of weight. But, this is not because of certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. What are these factors that have changed? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, افضل شامبو وبلسم like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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. We can see 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 younger brother.
The chart above shows that although the female advantage exists everywhere, the difference between countries is huge. In Russia women live 10 years longer than males; while in Bhutan the gap is less than half a year.
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The advantage women had in life expectancy was smaller in rich countries that it is today.
We will now examine the way that female advantages in life expectancy has changed over time. The chart below shows men and women’s life expectancies when they were born in the US in the years 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.
First, there’s 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.
Second, there’s a widening gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used to be very modest, but it grew substantially over the last century.
Using the option ‘Change country in the chart, you will be able to check that these two points are applicable to other countries that have available information: Sweden, France and the UK.