If you look around the normal retirement home or group of older friends, you’ll notice a big gender gap. Men over 85 are not common. The numbers back up what most people think, which is that they die younger than women.
The average life expectancy for men in Germany in 2022 was just over 78 years, while the average life expectancy for women was 82.8 years.
In the United States in 2021, women could expect to live about 79 years, while men could expect to live a little over 73 years. It’s been 5.8 years since the last time there was such a big gap.
Researchers in the US say in a new study that the gap is getting bigger because of things outside of the country, especially the COVID-19 virus.
The authors of the study, which came out in November 2023 in the JAMA Journal of Internal Medicine, say that the pandemic hurt men in the US more than women and shortened their average life expectancy.
What the researchers call “deaths of despair”—lives cut short by things like suicide, drug abuse, or violent crime—are another big reason why men have a lower life span.
“While rates of death from drug overdose and homicide have climbed for both men and women, it is clear that men constitute an increasingly disproportionate share of these deaths,” Brandon Yan, the study’s lead author, said.
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Men also die younger because of dangerous jobs and heart problems.
The difference in life expectancy between men and women is caused by other things.
A rheumatologist and senior faculty editor at Harvard Health Publishing named Robert H.
Shmerling says that men are more likely than women to skip regular check-ups and that men are much more likely than women to work in dangerous jobs like firefighting or military action.
Men kill themselves more often than women, which is something that Shmerling also says. One reason for this might be that getting mental health help is still seen as shameful in many cultures, especially among guys.
The medical expert says this is another important factor: Heart trouble. In the US, heart disease kills 50% more men than women.
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Things go better for guys in Europe.
The difference in life expectancy between men and women is narrowing outside of the US because fewer men are getting heart disease.
The writers from Germany’s Federal Institute for Population Research looked at life expectancy by gender in Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Slovakia, and Switzerland. They found that the difference in death rates between men and women had gone down.
The study was released in the European Journal of Public Health. It found that the difference in life expectancy between men and women decreased “mostly due to a decrease in male excess mortality from cardiovascular diseases and neoplasms.”
Neoplasms are growths, and cancers are dangerous ones.
In all seven countries that were part of the study, the death gap shrunk from 1996 to 2019.
In most places, this was mostly because fewer guys were getting heart disease. In France, the death gap between men and women narrowed a lot because fewer men got cancer.
There is some bad news, though. There is less of a difference between the lengths of lives of men and women in the Czech Republic because fewer men are dying from lung cancer, but more women are dying from it.
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Male mammals live shorter lives because of courtship and mating behavior.
The life spans of men and women in animals are not the only ones that are very different.
A study done by researchers from around the world in March 2020 found that in the wild, female mammals lived longer than men. It was written up in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists looked at 101 species and found that, on average, females lived 18.6% longer than males. That number is only 7.8% for people, though.
Bighorn sheep were one species that made this clear. But the woolly mammals also showed the experts that differences in life expectancy only happen when things are bad.
Male sheep don’t die much earlier than female sheep when their living situations are good and there is enough food for everyone.
When things don’t look so good, though, female bighorn sheep handle things better, in part because they have to use more energy to eat.
Women, on the other hand, are thought to spend a lot of energy on things like getting stronger or competing sexually. So, it looks like aggression lowers life expectancy for guys of all species, including humans.
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