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's the reason women have a longer life span than men? What is the reason has this advantage gotten larger over time? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to reach an unambiguous conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; however, we do not know how much the influence of each of these factors is.

We have learned that women live longer than males, regardless of weight. However this is not because of certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. What are these changing factors? 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 you can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line ; it means that in all nations baby girls can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

It is interesting to note that while the female advantage exists everywhere, اضيق وضعية للجماع the global differences are significant. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan there is a difference of only half a year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
The female advantage in terms of life expectancy was lower in countries with higher incomes as compared to the present.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancies at birth in the US from 1790-2014. Two distinct points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both genders in America have longer lives than they used to 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's a widening gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very small but it increased substantially in the past century.

You can confirm that these are applicable to other countries that have data by selecting the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.