Women Always Live Longer Than Men? It Is Not That Easy

Women Always Live Longer Than Men? It Is Not That Easy

Globally, men die on average four years earlier than women.

 

Women have a higher average life expectancy. But that doesn’t mean that all men die sooner. In fact, the odds of outliving women don’t look bad at all for men. This is especially true for two groups.

Odense. Women live longer than men: A Danish study puts this long-held claim into perspective. Accordingly, the average life expectancy is far too rough a measure that obscures the view of deviations from the mean. In fact, for example, men who are married and have college degrees are likely to live even longer than women.

In Germany, the average life expectancy in 2021 was 83.2 years for newborn girls and 78.2 years for newborn boys, according to the Federal Statistical Office . Such a difference between the sexes does not only apply to Germany. According to a report by the World Health Organization (WHO), men die on average four years earlier than women globally.

 

 

Service life is a greatly simplified measure

 

Various explanations are given as the reason for this discrepancy: Sometimes genetic advantages of women are seen as crucial, then again environmental or behavioral factors – for example that men tend to live unhealthier lives or go to the doctor less often.

The starting point of such analyzes is usually a comparison of life expectancy, i.e. the average lifespan. However, this is a greatly simplified measure, write scientists from the University of Southern Denmark in Odense in the journal “BMJ Open” . However, this measure does not take into account variations in lifespans between the sexes.

 

 

Men Have A Good Chance Of Living Longer Than Women

 

To get a fuller picture, the team relies on a different approach – called survival statistics. They examined gender differences in mortality in 199 countries over a period of about 200 years.

Findings: “Although life expectancy for men is generally lower than that for women, and mortality among men is higher at all ages, men have a significant chance of outliving women,” writes Marie-Pier Bergeron-Boucher’s group . She even cites a few examples of countries where men were at times more than 50 percent likely to live longer than women: Iceland in the late 20th century, Jordan and Iran in the 1950s, or Bhutan from 1995 to 2010.

Grandfather and granddaughter jumping and dancing on couch model released Symbolfoto property

In general, however, the probability that men will live longer than women fluctuated between 25 and 50 percent in almost all years and populations examined. In other words, over the past 200 years, one in four men (25-50 percent) lived longer than women.

 

Little Boys Die More Often Than Little Girls

 

This means that the majority of women are still older than men, the authors write: “But the minority that doesn’t is not small.” By no means all men live shorter lives than women, which is overlooked in pure comparisons of life expectancy . The difference in life expectancy is also based on the fact that a small part of the male population in many places only lives for a very short time. “For example, in most countries, young boys die more than young girls,” the study says.

In fact, survival statistics paint a more complex picture than a mere comparison of average life expectancies. Data from the USA shows that variations can be caused by external factors: there, between 2015 and 2019, the probability that men would live longer than women was 40 percent. However, the analysis shows that men with a lower level of education and unmarried men had a particularly low chance of surviving a wife. Married men and those with college degrees, on the other hand, tended to live longer than women who were unmarried or had no high school diploma.

 

Life span results from individual combination

 

The team emphasizes that lifespan length is the result of an individual complex combination of biological, environmental and behavioral factors. “While being male or female affects life expectancy, it is not the only determinant contributing to inequalities.”

A differentiated view is all the more important: “These results refute the general impression that “men do not live as long as women” and reveal a more nuanced inequality in the life expectancy of women and men.” Gender differences in life expectancy are misleading: “The inequalities are more complex.” Efforts to reduce lifespan differences must therefore target different factors, causes and age groups.

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