Bertrand Desjardins, a researcher in the demography department of the University of Montreal, explains. Men dying sooner than women makes sense biologically: because males are born for every females, it would assure that there are about the same number of men and women at reproductive ages. But even though women showed a longer life expectancy in almost every human society in the last decade of the 20th century, the size of the advantage varied greatly. For example, in the U. The discrepancy was much greater in some countries, with the difference in Russia reaching more than 12 years, but in others, such as India 0. The diversity in worldwide longevity alone indicates that the difference in mortality between the sexes is not purely biological and that there are intervening social factors.
At the same time as soon as I was born, I was already destined to die earlier than half the babies in my maternity ward — a curse so as to I can do little to avert. The reason? My sex. Simply anticipate to the fact that I am male, I can be expected en route for die around three years earlier than a woman born on the alike day. What is it about body a man that means I am likely to die younger than the women around me? And is it possible for me to break the curse of my gender? Although this puzzling divide has been known designed for decades, it is only recently so as to we have started coming close en route for some answers.
All over in the world women live longer than men — but this was not always the case. Why accomplish women live so much longer than men today, and why has this advantage increased over time? The confirmation is limited and we only allow partial answers. Independently of the accurate weight, we know that at slight part of the reason why women live so much longer than men today, but not in the ancient, has to do with the actuality that some key non-biological factors allow changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and comparatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often.
Accordingly, I answered, as matter-of-factly as I could, with one word: statistics. I knew that, on average, women animate longer than men. The average duration is about 5 years longer designed for women than men in the U. A glance around most nursing homes or assisted living facilities in the U. Advertisers know this as able-bodied.