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 has this advantage increased in the past? The evidence is sketchy and we only have incomplete solutions. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; however, we aren’t sure how strong the relative contribution of each one of these factors is.
In spite of the precise amount of weight, we are aware that a large portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men do today, but not previously, is to do with the fact that some important non-biological aspects have changed. These variables are evolving. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Other are more complicated. For Glorynote.com/%D8%B5%D8%A8%D8%BA-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D8%B9%D8%B1-%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%AF/ (Read More Here) 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. It is clear that all countries are over the diagonal line of parity. This means that a newborn girl in all countries can be expected to live for longer than her brothers.
This chart shows that, although women have an advantage everywhere, cross-country differences can be significant. In Russia women have a longer life span than men. In Bhutan the difference is just half each year.
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In countries with high incomes, the female advantage in longevity was smaller
Let’s now look at how the gender advantage in life expectancy has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the men and women’s life expectancies when they were born in the US between 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.
There is an upward trend. Both genders in America have longer lives than they were a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
And second, there is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be extremely small however, it has increased significantly in the past century.
When you click on the option “Change country by country’ in the chart, you can verify that these two points apply to the other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.