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. What is the reason women live longer than men? Why is this difference growing as time passes? The evidence is sketchy and we only have incomplete answers. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; however, we do not know how much the influence of each one of these factors is.

We have learned that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. However, this is not due to the fact that certain non-biological aspects have changed. What are these factors that have changed? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Other 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. As we can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line ; it means that in all nations that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart above shows that while the female advantage exists in all countries, cross-country differences are large. In Russia women have a longer life span than men, while in Bhutan the difference is just half an hour.

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The female advantage in life expectancy was less in countries with higher incomes that it is today.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart compares the life expectancy of males and females at birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.

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

And زيوت تطويل الشعر, link homepage, second, there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be extremely small, but it grew substantially during the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country by country' in the chart, you can verify that these two points apply to the other countries having available information: Sweden, France and the UK.