Pharm Tech Titans

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 has this advantage increased in the past? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn’t sufficient to support an unambiguous conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, but we don’t know exactly how much the influence to each of these variables is.

It is known that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. However, this is not because of certain non-biological aspects have changed. These are the factors that are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Certain 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 all countries are over the line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl in all countries can anticipate to live longer than her brothers.

The chart above shows that although the female advantage is present everywhere, Blockopedia.org/index.php/User:FranklynOua, http://www.yacoub.com/__media__/js/netsoltrademark.php?d=blockopedia.org%2Findex.php%2FUser%3AFranklynOua, difference between countries is huge. In Russia women are 10 years older than men, while in Bhutan the difference is just half an hour.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was smaller in rich countries than it is now.

Let’s see how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Both genders in the United States live longer than they used to a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The gap is widening: While the advantage of women in life expectancy was once tiny but it has risen significantly in the past.

It is possible to verify that these points are also applicable to other countries with data by clicking on the “Change country” option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.