Why Are Women Living 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 in the present, and why has this advantage increased over time? The evidence is limited and we only have partial solutions. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; however, we aren't sure how much the influence of each one of these factors is.

We know that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. But it is not because of certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. These are the factors that are changing. Some are well known and العاب زوجية relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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 every country is above the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl in every country can anticipate to live longer than her brothers.

Interestingly, this chart shows that the advantage of women is present everywhere, difference between countries is huge. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men; in Bhutan the difference is just half a year.

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The advantage of women in life expectancy was much lower in the richer countries than it is today.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the male and female lifespans at birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two areas stand out.

There is an upward trend. and women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, the gap is widening: While the advantage of women in life expectancy was once quite small however, it has grown significantly over time.

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