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 longer than men, and why have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? We only have a few clues and the evidence is not sufficient to draw an informed conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; however, we do not know how much the influence of each one of these factors is.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that at least part of the reason why women live longer than men today but not in the past, is to have to do with the fact that certain fundamental non-biological factors have changed. The factors changing are numerous. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are other issues 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 men and زيوت تطويل الشعر 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 for longer than a newborn boy.1

It is interesting to note that, while the advantage for women exists in all countries, difference between countries is huge. In Russia women are 10 years older than males; while in Bhutan the difference is just half an hour.

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In the richer countries, the women's advantage in longevity used to be smaller
We will now examine how the advantage of women in life expectancy has changed over time. The following chart shows male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two areas stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend: Men and 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.

The gap is getting wider: Although the advantage of women in life expectancy was once extremely small It has significantly increased with time.

By selecting 'Change Country from the chart, you are able to check that these two points are applicable to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.