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. Why do women live longer than men, and why have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn't sufficient to draw an unambiguous conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; but we don't know exactly how significant the impact of each one of these factors is.

We have learned that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. But, this is not due to the fact that certain biological or 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. There are others that are more intricate. 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 we can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line - which means that in every country that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This graph shows that while there is a female advantage throughout the world, the differences between countries can be substantial. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the gap is only half a year.

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In the richer countries, the advantage of women in longevity was previously smaller.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US in the years 1790 until 2014. Two points stand out.

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

Second, the gap is increasing: While the female advantage in life expectancy was tiny It has significantly increased over time.

By selecting 'Change Country from the chart, افضل كريم للشعر (from the Glorynote blog) you will be able to verify that these two points also apply to the other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.