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. What makes women live much longer than men today, and why have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? There isn't much evidence and we're only able to provide partial answers. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; but we don't know exactly what the contribution to each of these variables is.

Independently of the exact amount of weight, كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور we are aware that at a minimum, the reason why women live longer than men do today, but not in the past, has to be due to the fact that certain fundamental 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. Certain 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. We can see that all countries are over the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl in every country can be expected to live for longer than her brothers.

This chart illustrates that, even though women enjoy an advantage in all countries, the differences across countries are often significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the difference is just half a year.

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In countries with high incomes, the advantage of women in longevity used to be smaller
Let's examine how the female advantage in life expectancy has changed over time. The next chart plots the life expectancy of males and females when they were born in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. as well as women in the US live much, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The gap is increasing: While the advantage of women in life expectancy was very small, it has increased substantially over time.

You can check if these points are also applicable to other countries that have data by clicking on the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.