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. What's the main reason women live longer than men? And why has this advantage gotten larger over time? There is only limited evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to reach an absolute conclusion. We know there are biological, psychological as well as environmental factors which play a significant role in the longevity of women over males, it isn't clear how much each one contributes.

In spite of the amount of weight, we are aware that at a minimum, the reason why women live so much longer than men in the present, but not in the past, has to relate to the fact that several significant non-biological elements have changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Some are more complex. For اوضاع الجماع 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 you can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line ; it means that in all nations the newborn girl is likely to live for longer than a new boy.1

This chart illustrates that, although women have an advantage throughout the world, the differences between countries could be significant. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the difference is only half a year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
In the richer countries, the female advantage in longevity was not as great.
We will now examine how the advantage of women in longevity has changed with time. The following chart shows the male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US in the years 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.

There is an upward trend. and women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used be extremely small but it increased substantially over the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country in the chart, you will be able to verify that these two points are also applicable to other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.