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's the main reason women live longer than men? Why has this advantage gotten larger over time? The evidence isn't conclusive and we're only able to provide partial solutions. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, but we don't know exactly how strong the relative contribution of each of these factors is.

It is known that women live longer than males, صبغ الشعر بالاسود regardless of weight. However, this is not because of certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Certain 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, every country is above the diagonal line of parity - which means that in every country that a baby girl can be expected to live for longer than a new boy.1

It is interesting to note that while the female advantage exists everywhere, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women have a longer life span than men; in Bhutan the gap is just half an hour.

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The female advantage in terms of life expectancy was lower in the richer countries that it is today.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart shows the life expectancy of males and females when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two areas stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both men as well as women in the US live much, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is an increasing gap: صبغ الشعر بالاسود (Read Home ) The female advantage in life expectancy used to be extremely small however it increased dramatically in the past century.

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