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 are more likely to live longer than men? And how the advantage has grown in the past? The evidence is sketchy and we have only partial solutions. While we are aware that there are biological, behavioral as well as environmental factors that play an integral role in women living longer than men, we do not know how much each one contributes.

We have learned that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. However this isn't because of certain 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. 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 تحاميل مهبلية men and women. As we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line - it means that in all nations that a baby girl can be expected to live for تحاميل مهبلية longer than a new boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that, while the advantage for women exists across all countries, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half an hour.

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The advantage for women in terms of life expectancy was lower in countries with higher incomes than it is today.
We will now examine the way that female advantages in terms of longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the men and women's life expectancies at the time of birth in the US in the years 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women in the United States live longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The gap is increasing: While the advantage of women in life expectancy was quite small however, it has grown significantly with time.

By selecting 'Change Country by country' in the chart, you will be able to determine if these two points apply to other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.