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. Why do women live so more than men do today, and why is this difference growing in the past? We only have partial evidence and علامات الحمل بولد the evidence is not sufficient to support an unambiguous conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, However, we're not sure how strong the relative contribution of each of these factors is.

Independently of the exact amount of weight, we are aware that at least part of the reason women live so much longer than men do today and not previously, has to be due to the fact that certain key non-biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Some are more complex. 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 over the diagonal line of parity. This means that a newborn girl in every country can anticipate to live longer than her brother.

This graph shows that even though women enjoy an advantage in all countries, the differences across countries can be significant. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the gap is just half a year.

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In wealthy countries, the advantage of women in longevity was smaller
Let's look at the way that female advantages in life expectancy has changed over time. The following chart shows the male and female lifespans when they were born in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

First, علامات الحمل بولد there is an upward trend. Women and men in America live longer than they were a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be quite small, but it grew substantially during the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country' on the chart, you will be able to determine if these two points also apply to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.