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 longer than men in the present, and why has this advantage increased in the past? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn’t sufficient to reach an unambiguous conclusion. We know there are behavioral, biological and environmental variables that all play a role in the longevity of women over males, it isn’t clear what percentage each factor plays in.
In spite of the weight, we know that at least part of the reason why women live so much longer than men do today and not previously, has to have to do with the fact that some important non-biological aspects have changed. These factors are changing. 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. We can see that 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
This graph shows that although there is a women’s advantage everywhere, cross-country differences can be substantial. In Russia women live 10 years longer than males; while in Bhutan the difference is just half an hour.
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In rich countries the advantage of women in longevity was not as great.
Let’s look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart compares the male and female lifespans when they were born in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two specific points stand Www.fireinnovations.net/index.php/Why_Do_Women_Have_Longer_Lives_Than_Men out.
There is an upward trend. Both genders in the United States live longer than they were a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
The second is that there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used be very small however, it has increased significantly during the last century.
When you click on the option «Change country’ on the chart, you are able to determine if these two points apply to other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.