NPR: The average life span for Americans fell by over seven months last year : Shots - Health News NPR: The average life span for Americans fell by over seven months last year : Shots - Health News.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/12/22/1144864971/american-life-expectancy-is-now-at-its-lowest-in-nearly-two-decades
I am always amazed by this: average life span decreasing in ~7 months makes headlines, but a much bigger difference, that between men and women (10× larger) is usually mentioned in a sentence buried in a paragraph towards the end of the article, with no signs of alarm or displays of curiosity about the reasons for the gap or about what's being done to close it…
> _“Men and women saw a similar decline in life expectancy last year, but women are living, on average, until over 79 years old, which is about **six years longer than men**.”_
@tripu morbid humor aside, there is actually a lot of research into the topic. Googling it up produced results back to the 1980s pretty quickly. There is also this:
https://ourworldindata.org/why-do-women-live-longer-than-men
Yes, to some extent we know why men die ~6 years earlier than women. Yet the relative influence of all factors (biology, lifestyle choices, societal expectations, forms of violence) is unclear.
I think that more research is needed to resolve that.
And that regardless of what the primary causes are, more attention and resources should be devoted to closing that gap — relative to what is spent on equivalent gender differences working in the opposite direction (eg, the wage gap, women in #STEM, female representation at the top of organisations). There is a huge imbalance there.
