We already know that women tend to get older than men. The World Health Organization (WHO) has now highlighted the most common reasons for this.
The good news beforehand: people’s life expectancy is still rising. A boy born today turns 70 on average, a girl 74. But where does this difference come from? The World Health Organization ( WHO ) also wanted to know that and listed which causes of death had an impact on gender.
These points affect more the life expectancy of men
The result: out of 44 causes of death, 33 more affect the life expectancy of men – mainly due to health and gender reasons. The biggest differences between men and women are the following:
- Heart disease (men cost 0.84 more years of life than women)
- Traffic accidents (men cost 0.47 years more than women)
- Lung cancer (men cost 0.4 years more than women)
Strong immune system thanks to X-chromosome
Another advantage that girls have: genetics. The X chromosome strengthens the girls’ immune system, making them more likely to survive infancy. This is also confirmed by the statistics: in 2017, the risk for boys to die before their fifth birthday was eleven percent higher than that of girls.
But the behavior of men also shapes their life expectancy. According to the WHO , men in rich countries smoke about five times more often than women and drink four times more alcohol. And: Diseases are probably still regarded by many men as a weakness, because they seek compared to women much later in complaints medical advice.
How the job affects life expectancy
Another factor: For men, the risk of dying in a traffic accident is more than twice that of women over the age of 15. One of the reasons is that men work more frequently in traffic areas, for example in road construction or garbage collection.
In addition, the WHO compared the relationship between murder and suicide rates. A man is 75 percent more likely to kill than a woman, and men are murdered four times more often. However, one must note in this list that the absolute case numbers are rather small compared to other types of death.
In poorer countries the differences are smaller
It is also striking that in poorer countries the differences in life expectancy between the two sexes are lower. There are two main reasons for this: firstly, in developing countries more people are dying from infectious diseases that can affect women and men alike. On the other hand, the risk of dying from pregnancy or childbirth is significantly higher for women in developing countries: one in 41 women dies in this context, and in economically richer countries, only one in 3,300 is affected.