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. Why do women live so longer than men and how is this difference growing in the past? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to support an unambiguous conclusion. We know 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 of these factors is.

Independently of the exact number of pounds, we know that a large portion of the reason why women live longer than men and not previously, العاب زوجية has to have to do with the fact that some important non-biological aspects have changed. These factors are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, 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. As you can see, all countries are above the diagonal line of parity - this means in all countries that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart above shows that although the female advantage exists across all countries, the country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women are 10 years older than men. In Bhutan the difference is just half each year.

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The advantage of women in life expectancy was much lower in the richer countries than it is today.
We will now examine how the female advantage in longevity has changed with time. The next chart compares male and العاب زوجية female life expectancy when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two areas stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both men as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did 100 years 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 terms of life expectancy was extremely small It has significantly increased with time.

If you select the option "Change country from the chart, you can check that these two points also apply to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.