Why men die younger than women?

Most men die before women do in the United States In 2021. American women lived, on average, 79 years. However, life expectancy for American men was only about 73 years. This isn't just true of the US. Women outlive men in 37 other comparable countries. As long as records have been kept in an all countries, women have lived longer than men. Across basically almost every major cause of death, men are more likely to die than women are. The United States has the highest rate of avoidable deaths among men or deaths before the age of 75 than any comparable country. For every 100,000 men in the US, 337 die of avoidable causes. That's over 100 more men than in the UK, the country with the second highest rate, and more than double the number of Swiss men who die prematurely.

It's not that old women outlive old men. It's that men tend to be outlived by women in just about every age cohort. Demography really is destiny. If you change the shape of people, you change the shape of everything. The US and countries around the world are undergoing rapid population aging. This can have serious implications for society as a whole. Because women can expect to live longer, but they've had lower earnings. They've had patchier careers. But they still have to support a longer retirement because they live longer. And so, it's a particular challenge for women. So why do men die before women and what can we do about it?

So, when you hear that the life expectancy in 2021 was 76.1 years, it means that on average people who died in that in 2021 died at the age of 76 years. Well, the size of this life expectancy gap between men and women differs across places. Women always live longer, and this is due to a combination of biological, social and behavioral factors.

There's some evidence that biological differences between men and women can contribute to the life expectancy gap. But biology is not the only explanation. Understanding the role of particular sex-linked genes, exposure to hormone profiles that differ between males and females, but also differences in factors related to health behaviors such as smoking, engaging in risky behaviors. I see this particularly at younger ages. Men tend to be more likely to die from things like accidents, suggesting that there are some behavioral things, the sort of stereotypical stories guys ride in their motorcycles around and that women are less likely to do things like that. And that's part of why they live longer.

Men are also less likely to seek out mental health treatment than women. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death among men, and they are four times more likely to die due to suicide than women. That men are just socialized to live riskier lives if they don't go to the doctor. When they do go to the doctor, they don't listen to the doctor's advice. When they're prescribed medication, they don't finish their medication. So, there's a whole area of men's health that relates to things like watching, monitoring, doing the things that women are more likely to do, which is one of the reasons that they live longer, that men have not been socialized to do to the same extent.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that men are more likely to die due to work related incidents, and this is because men are more likely to work in the most dangerous jobs in the country. So, industries like logging, fishing and hunting, construction and mining. The numbers also get more complicated when factoring in race. African-American men are tremendously disadvantaged in terms of the likelihood that they will live long, healthy lives. But this is due to social factors. So, exposure to subpar medical care, racial discrimination in everyday life, major episodes of discrimination, exposure and the stress that causes.

There's also a disparity in mortality rates among transgender people. People who are on the trans feminine to non-binary spectrum are at the greatest risk of mortality compared to non-trans men and women. Experts suspect this gap is a result of both biological and social factors, but they say that more research is needed to fully understand the causes behind the disparity. There hasn't always been a life expectancy gap between men and women. What became known as "the female advantage" emerged around 1890 and continued to grow throughout the 20th century, except for a decline during the 1918 flu pandemic. This change over time suggests to researchers that there could be an environmental component to life expectancy. That means there are some steps we can take to work towards helping men live longer.

Everybody, men as well as women, benefit from a suite of particular behaviors. So, for example, a healthy diet, getting physical activity, not smoking, no to moderate alcohol consumption, maintaining deep supportive social relationships. These are things that benefit everybody, including men. What is it about the socialization of men that means that they're not participating in the health care system the way they should be to extend their lives? Public policy measures can also be taken to improve men's health. So, for example, in Russia, the life expectancy gap between men and women is huge. One of the factors that was isolated was the exceptionally high use of alcohol by Russian men. And there was actually a policy change a few decades ago where they eliminated the sale of vodka before lunch time and life expectancy for men went up. That's suggests fairly convincingly that there's something about behaviors, social behaviors, which are also modifiable.

Other policies have proven effective at decreasing mortality among men. Restricting access to guns has shown a decrease in death by suicide. Labor policies that increase paid sick leave, provide disability insurance and establish higher minimum wages show a correlation with a decrease in deaths among all working age adults. Men with lower income or more financial stress are more likely to have chronic medical conditions. One of the things that's potentially encouraging about this is that the nature of work is changing. How people do their work can change. So, this suggests potential targets for improving the health of the population. The life expectancy statistics are averages. They're probabilistic, they're not deterministic. This isn't fate.

The life expectancy gender gap can have a major impact on retirement. The numbers we've presented so far are the average life expectancy from birth for each gender. Researchers also look at the life expectancy from age 65 onward. The average 65-year-old woman living in the U.S. can expect to live about another 20 years, whereas men can only expect to live another 17. If you make it to age 60 to 65, you can still expect to live a pretty long time. And that's especially so for people in the top half of the income distribution, for people who have college degrees. And that means that they can expect a pretty long lifespan. And I would say it's a particular issue for women because women can expect to live longer, but they've had lower earnings, they've had patchier careers because of caregiving, both for children and often for elders. Not only do American women live longer on average, but they're more likely than men to have no retirement savings.

This could be due to women earning less on average over their lifetimes than men do People are living longer, which implies that we need to spend more time in the workforce with people having the potential to live longer. This implies that we rethink our life course in terms of the amount of time we spend in the workforce relative to retirement. And a big obstacle that we see is employment opportunities for older workers. If you have a much older population, the types of demands that it's going to be making on the marketplace and governments is going to be very different. If you have a much more female population, there are probably going to be different too. Women are more likely to depend on Social Security benefits than men. 42% of elderly women receiving Social Security depend on it for at least half of their income, compared to 37% of men. 15% of female Social Security beneficiaries rely on it for 90% or more of their income. Roughly 15% of the federal budget in fiscal year 2022 went toward funding the Social Security Administration, which amounts to nearly $1.4 trillion. The government estimates that the Social Security reserves will run out by 2037. Think of Social Security as a pay as you go system. We have more baby boomers retiring than people in the workforce that are paying into the system. This lack of resources can present a problem for retired women. But by the time you reach about the age of 40, there are more women in that country usually than there are men. Why does nobody sell anything to older women? Why does nobody design anything for older women? Older women tend to be a pretty powerful group in most Western countries, but there's no political party that targets them. The marketplace doesn't acknowledge that they exist.