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? Why the advantage has grown over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence is not sufficient to reach a definitive conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; however, we do not know how strong the relative contribution of each of these factors is.
In spite of how much weight, we know that at least a portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men do today however not as previously, is Return to our website, https://prestigeanimalhospitalnorth.securevetsource.com/index.pml?retUrl=http://www.freakyexhibits.net/index.php/Why_Do_Women_Live_Longer_Than_Men, have to do with the fact that certain fundamental non-biological factors have changed. These variables are evolving. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are others that are more intricate. 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, all countries are above the diagonal parity line ; this means in all countries the newborn girl is likely to live for longer than a newborn boy.1
It is interesting to note that, while the advantage for women is present everywhere, cross-country differences are large. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the difference is just half a year.
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In rich countries the longevity advantage for women was previously smaller.
Let’s see how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.
There is an upward trend. and women in the US are living much, much longer today than 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 be extremely small however, it has increased significantly over the course of the last century.
By selecting ‘Change Country in the chart, you are able to determine if these two points are applicable to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.