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 have a longer life span than men? And why the advantage has grown as time passes? The evidence isn't conclusive and we're only able to provide incomplete solutions. While we are aware that there are behavioral, biological as well as environmental factors which play a significant role in women who live longer than males, it isn't clear how much each one contributes.

We know that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. However it is not because of certain biological or 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. 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 - this means that in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that while the female advantage exists everywhere, the global differences are significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than males; while in Bhutan the difference is just half a year.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was much lower in countries with higher incomes as compared to the present.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart compares the life expectancy of males and علامات الحمل بولد females when they were born in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both genders in the United States live longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used to be extremely small, but it grew substantially during the last century.

Using the option 'Change country in the chart, you will be able to verify that these two points also apply to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.