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 main reason women live longer than men? What is the reason the advantage has grown as time passes? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to support a definitive conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; but we don’t know exactly how significant the impact to each of these variables is.
In spite of the amount of weight, we are aware that at a minimum, the reason women live longer than men and not previously, has to do with the fact that certain key non-biological factors have changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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 parity line , this means that in all countries baby girls can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1
Interestingly, this chart shows that although the female advantage exists everywhere, the difference between countries is huge. In Russia women live 10 years more than males. In Bhutan the difference is only half a year.
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The advantage for women in life expectancy was less in developed countries than it is today.
Let’s look at how the advantage of women in longevity has changed with time. The chart below illustrates the male and female life expectancy at the time of birth in the US in the years 1790 to 2014. Two things stand Biographon.guru/profile.php?id=399489 out.
First, there’s an upward trend. as well as women in the US have a much longer life span longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
There is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be very modest but it increased substantially in the past century.
By selecting ‘Change Country from the chart, you will be able to determine if these two points also apply to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.