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 makes women live much longer than men today and why have these advantages gotten bigger over time? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to reach an unambiguous conclusion. While we are aware that there are behavioral, biological and اضيق وضعية للجماع environmental factors which play a significant role in women's longevity more than males, we aren't sure what percentage each factor plays in.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that at least a portion of the reason women live longer than men do today but not in the past, has to do with the fact that a number of 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. It is clear 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 older brother.

It is interesting to note that the advantage of women exists across all countries, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia, women live 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the difference is only half a year.

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In the richer countries, the advantage of women in longevity used to be smaller
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two aspects stand out.

First, 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.

The second is that there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used be extremely small, but it grew substantially over the last century.

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