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 reason women have a longer life span than men? And why the advantage has grown as time passes? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn't sufficient to support a definitive conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, however, we do not know how strong the relative contribution of each factor is.

We know that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. But this is not due to the fact that certain non-biological aspects 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, افضل كريم للشعر 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 line of parity diagonally. This means that a newborn girl from any country can be expected to live for longer than her brothers.

Interestingly, this chart shows that, while the advantage for women is present everywhere, global differences are significant. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the difference is only half a year.

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The advantage of women in life expectancy was smaller in countries with higher incomes that it is today.
Let's look at how the gender advantage in longevity has changed over time. The chart below shows gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the time of birth in the US in the years 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both genders living in America are living longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used to be very small however it increased dramatically over the course of the last century.

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