Why Women Live Longer Than Men

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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 much longer than men today and how is this difference growing over time? The evidence is limited and we only have limited answers. We know that behavioral, biological and زيوت تطويل الشعر environmental factors contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; but we don't know exactly how strong the relative contribution of each one of these factors is.

We are aware that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. But this is not due to the fact that certain non-biological factors have changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others are more complicated. For زيوت تطويل الشعر 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 line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl from any country can expect to live longer than her younger brother.

It is interesting to note that the advantage of women exists everywhere, the difference between countries is huge. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half a calendar year.

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The advantage of women in terms of life expectancy was lower in rich countries than it is now.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below illustrates the men and women's life expectancies at the birth in the US during the period 1790 to 2014. Two aspects stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both men as well as women in the US are living much, much 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 be extremely small however, it has increased significantly over the course of the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country in the chart, you are able to verify that these two points apply to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.