Why Women Are More Likely To 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 how have these advantages gotten bigger over time? The evidence isn't conclusive and we have only limited answers. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; however, we aren't sure how significant the impact of each one of these factors is.

We know that women live longer than males, regardless of weight. But this is not due to the fact that certain biological factors have changed. These 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. We can see that every country is above the diagonal line of parity. This means that a newborn girl from every country could anticipate to live longer than her older brother.

The chart below shows that although women have an advantage in all countries, the differences across countries could be significant. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the difference is just half a year.

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The advantage of women in terms of life expectancy was lower in the richer countries than it is today.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US during the period 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.

First, there's 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.

Second, ابر التخسيس the gap is widening: While the advantage of women in life expectancy used to be very small however, it has grown significantly over time.

By selecting 'Change Country' on the chart, check that these two points are also applicable to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.