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 longer than men, and why have these advantages gotten bigger over time? There is only limited evidence and the evidence isn’t sufficient to reach an informed conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, however, we aren’t sure how strong the relative contribution to each of these variables is.
It is known that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. But this isn’t because of certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. What are these factors that have changed? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, Almuttaqintria.a-masjid.com/userinfo.php?uid=16149 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. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal line of parity – which means that in every country baby girls can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1
The chart below shows that even though women enjoy an advantage across all countries, differences between countries could be significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half a year.
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In rich countries the advantage of women in longevity used to be smaller
Let’s examine how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US during the period 1790 until 2014. Two areas stand out.
First, there’s an upward trend. Men as well as women in the US are living much, much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
And second, there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used to be very modest however, it has increased significantly over the course of the last century.
By selecting ‘Change Country by country’ in the chart, confirm that the two points are applicable to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.