Why Do Dominican Women Have Higher Life Expectancy Than Men?

The National Statistics Office (ONE) predicts that by 2030, Dominican women's life expectancy at birth will be about six years higher than men's, Diario Libre reported.

According to an infographic posted on the ONE website, Dominican women can expect to live an average of 78.13 years after 2025, while men can expect to live an average of 72.56 years.

This gap in birth life expectancy will be five and a half years greater for women than for males by 2025. (5.57 years).

In the following five years (2030), that difference would increase to 5.75 years. Is there a global occurrence of that difference? The gap in life expectancy between men and women is 75.6 years for women and 70.8 years for men, according to Worldmeters.info.

Why do women live longer?

An international team of scientists led by Jean-François Lemaître of Lyon 1 University in France collected data on age-related mortality in 134 populations of 101 species of wild mammals in 2020.

"It was surprising to observe that this gender gap in life expectancy often exceeds that seen in humans and, at the same time, is extremely variable between species," Lemaître said.

"For example, female lions live at least 50% longer in the wild than male lions," said Tamás Székely of the University of Bath, one of the study's authors.

"We previously thought that this was mainly due to sexual selection, with males fighting each other to overtake a pack and therefore gain access to females, however, our data does not support this," Székely said.

The risk of mortality does not rise more quickly in men than in females across all species, despite the fact that females live longer than males do. As a result, they assert, there must be additional, more complicated elements at work, such as the environment in which the animals exist and sex-specific growth, survival, and reproduction over the course of the species' evolutionary history.

For instance, roaming males can be exposed to more environmental diseases, according to the authors of the study. Three bighorn sheep populations showed this.

In the Dominican Republic, in 2021, of all fatalities resulting from violent crime or traffic accidents, 80.0% (3,864) of them were men, 11.6% (511) were women, and 0.4% did not reveal their sex.