Why 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 more than men do today and why does this benefit increase over time? The evidence isn't conclusive and we're only able to provide limited answers. We recognize that biological, behavioral and اوضاع الجماع 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 are living longer than men, regardless of weight. However this isn't because of certain non-biological factors have changed. The factors changing are numerous. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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 all countries are above the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl in every country can anticipate to live longer than her brothers.

The chart above shows that while the female advantage is present everywhere, global differences are significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men; in Bhutan the difference is less than half an hour.

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In rich countries the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the birth in the US between 1790 to 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. and 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.

And second, there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be extremely small however it increased dramatically over the course of the last century.

You can verify that these are applicable to other countries with data by clicking the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, اوضاع الجماع France, and Sweden.