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’s the reason women live longer than men? And how the advantage has grown as time passes? The evidence isn’t conclusive and افضل شامبو وبلسم we’re left with only some solutions. While we are aware that there are behavioral, biological and environmental factors which all play a part in women living longer than males, we aren’t sure how much each one contributes.
We know that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. But this isn’t due to the fact that certain non-biological factors have changed. The factors changing are numerous. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Some are more complex. 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, every country is above the diagonal parity line , which means that in every country that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a newborn boy.1
The chart above shows that the advantage of women exists everywhere, the country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than males; while in Bhutan the gap is just half an hour.
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In the richer countries, the women’s advantage in longevity was not as great.
Let’s look at how the advantage of women in longevity has changed over time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US from 1790 until 2014. Two distinct features stand out.
There is an upward trend. Women and men in America have longer lives than they were 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 terms of life expectancy used be very small, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.
Using the option ‘Change country’ on the chart, you will be able to confirm that the two points are applicable to other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.