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. Why do women live more than men do today and why has this advantage increased over time? The evidence is sketchy and we have only some solutions. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer lives than men, However, we're not sure how strong the relative contribution to each of these variables is.

We are aware that women are living longer than males, regardless of weight. However, this is not because of certain non-biological factors have changed. These factors are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Some are more complex. 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 the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a new boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that, while the advantage for علامات الحمل بولد women exists everywhere, the country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women have a longer life span than males; while in Bhutan the difference is less than half an hour.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in countries with higher incomes than it is today.
Let's now look at how the advantage of women in life expectancy has changed over time. The following chart shows the male and female life expectancy at the birth in the US during the period 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.

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

There is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be extremely small, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country from the chart, you can determine if these two points apply to other countries that have available information: Sweden, France and the UK.