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 why women are more likely to live longer than men? And why does this benefit increase as time passes? The evidence isn’t conclusive and we have only incomplete solutions. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, However, we’re not sure how strong the relative contribution to each of these variables is.
We are aware that women live longer than males, regardless of weight. But this is not because of certain non-biological aspects have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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, اضيق وضعية للجماع 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 over the diagonal line of parity. This means that a newborn girl from every country could anticipate to live longer than her older brother.
This graph shows that although women have an advantage everywhere, cross-country differences could be significant. In Russia women live 10 years more than men. In Bhutan, the difference is less than half a calendar year.
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The advantage women had in life expectancy was smaller in countries with higher incomes than it is today.
Let’s see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct points stand out.
First, there is an upward trend. Women and men in the United States live longer than they used to 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
Second, the gap is growing: Although the advantage of women in life expectancy was once very small but it has risen significantly with time.
Using the option ‘Change country’ on the chart, you can check that these two points are also applicable to other countries that have available information: Sweden, France and the UK.
