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 main reason women have a longer life span than men? What is the reason the advantage has grown over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence is not sufficient to reach an informed conclusion. We know that behavioral, تحاميل مهبلية biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we do not know how significant the impact of each of these factors is.

In spite of how much weight, we know that at least a portion of the reason women live longer than men do today and not previously, has to relate to the fact that a number of key non-biological factors 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. We can see that every country is above the diagonal parity line , this means that in all countries the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a new boy.1

This graph shows that although women have an advantage everywhere, تحاميل مهبلية cross-country differences could be significant. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan, the difference is just half a year.

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The advantage of women in life expectancy was less in developed countries that it is today.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below illustrates the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Men as well as women in the US live much, 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 increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be extremely small but it increased substantially during the last century.

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