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. Why do women live more than men do today, and why have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? The evidence is limited and we only have limited answers. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; however, we aren't sure how strong the relative contribution to each of these variables is.

We have learned that women are living longer than men, regardless of weight. But this is not because of certain non-biological aspects have changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Other are more complicated. 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 line of parity - this means that in all countries that a baby girl can be expected to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that the advantage of women exists across all countries, اضيق وضعية للجماع the cross-country differences are large. In Russia, women live 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half a calendar year.

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In the richer countries, the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's look at how the advantage of women in longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the men and women's life expectancies at the time of birth in the US between 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Men and women in the US have a much longer life span longer 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 life expectancy used be extremely small but it increased substantially during the last century.

It is possible to verify that these are applicable to other countries that have data by selecting the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.