Why Do 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 so longer than men in the present, and why does this benefit increase over time? There isn't much evidence and we're left with only incomplete solutions. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; however, we do not know how strong the relative contribution of each factor is.

We have learned that women are living longer than men, regardless of weight. However this isn't because of certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, العاب زوجية 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 all countries are above the diagonal parity line ; it means that in all nations baby girls can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This graph shows that even though women enjoy an advantage across all countries, differences between countries are often significant. In Russia women are 10 years older than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half each year.

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In rich countries the longevity advantage for women was previously smaller.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart shows the male and female lifespans at birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two specific points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Both genders living in America are living 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 life expectancy used be quite small but it increased substantially over the last century.

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