Why Women Live Longer Than Men

Everywhere in the world women live longer than men - but this was not always the case. The available data from rich countries shows that women didn't live longer than men in the 19th century. What makes women live more than men do today and how has this advantage increased in the past? The evidence isn't conclusive and we're only able to provide partial solutions. While we are aware that there are behavioral, افضل شامبو وبلسم biological, and environmental factors which play a significant role in women who live longer than men, we don't know how much each one contributes.

In spite of the precise weight, we know that a large portion of the reason women live longer than men in the present however not as in the past, has to be due to the fact that several important non-biological aspects have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are other issues that are more intricate. For example, افضل شامبو وبلسم there is evidence that in rich countries the female advantage increased in part because infectious diseases used to affect women disproportionately a century ago, so advances in medicine that reduced the long-term health burden from infectious diseases, especially for survivors, ended up raising women's longevity disproportionately.

Everywhere in the world women tend to live longer than men
The first chart below shows life expectancy at birth for men and women. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal parity line - which means that in every country that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that the advantage of women is present everywhere, country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women live 10 years more than men. In Bhutan, the difference is less than half a calendar year.

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The advantage for women in terms of life expectancy was lower in developed countries than it is now.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart compares male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Women and men in America have longer lives than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be quite small, but it grew substantially over the last century.

Using the option 'Change country in the chart, you will be able to confirm that the two points also apply to other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.