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. What's the reason why women have a longer life span than men? And how does this benefit increase in the past? There isn't much evidence and we're only able to provide some answers. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we do not know how significant the impact of each factor is.

In spite of how much amount, we can say that a large portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men in the present however not as previously, is to be due to the fact that certain fundamental non-biological factors have changed. These variables are evolving. Some are well known and 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. As we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line , which means that in every country baby girls can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

It is interesting to note that while the female advantage exists across all countries, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the difference is just half a year.

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The female advantage in life expectancy was less in countries with higher incomes than it is now.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the male and female life expectancies at birth in the US during the period 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Men 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 second, there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very modest however it increased dramatically over the last century.

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