Why Are Women Living 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's the reason why women are more likely to live longer than men? And why the advantage has grown as time passes? There isn't much evidence and we're only able to provide limited solutions. We know that biological, behavioral and العاب زوجية environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, however, we aren't sure what the contribution of each of these factors is.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that a large portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men in the present but not previously, has to be due to the fact that some fundamental non-biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are others that are more intricate. For example, 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. As we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line - this means that in all countries baby girls can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that, العاب زوجية while the advantage for women exists everywhere, the country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women live 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the gap is less that half a year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in rich countries that it is today.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed over time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancy at the birth in the US from 1790 until 2014. Two points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend: Men as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be quite small but it increased substantially over the last century.

You can verify that these are applicable to other countries that have data by clicking the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.