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's the reason why women have a longer life span than men? And how is this difference growing over time? We only have partial evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to support an absolute conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, but we don't know exactly how much the influence of each of these factors is.

Independently of the exact amount, we can say that a large portion of the reason why women live longer than men today, but not previously, is to relate to the fact that certain key 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. 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 line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl from any country can be expected to live for longer than her brother.

This chart is interesting in that it shows that although the female advantage exists everywhere, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan there is a difference of less that half a year.

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In wealthy countries, العاب زوجية, click for info, the women's advantage in longevity was previously smaller.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below shows gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the birth in the US in the years 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Women and men in the United States live longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used be quite small but it increased substantially in the past century.

It is possible to verify that the points you've listed are applicable to other countries that have data by clicking the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.