Why Do Women Have Longer Lives 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 longer than men and why is this difference growing over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn't sufficient to draw a definitive conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, but we don't know exactly how strong the relative contribution to each of these variables is.

We know that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. But this is not because of certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. The factors changing are numerous. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others are more complex. 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 اوضاع الجماع 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 - this means in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

The chart below shows that although women have an advantage across all countries, differences between countries can be significant. In Russia women are 10 years older than men, while in Bhutan the difference is less than half a year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
In countries with high incomes, the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US between 1790 until 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Both genders living in America are living longer than they used to 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The gap is widening: While the advantage of women in terms of life expectancy was extremely small, it has increased substantially over time.

It is possible to verify that these principles are also applicable to other countries with data by selecting the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, اوضاع الجماع and Sweden.