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 live longer than men? And why does this benefit increase over time? The evidence is sketchy and we only have limited solutions. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; but we don't know exactly how strong the relative contribution to each of these variables is.

Independently of the exact amount of weight, we are aware that a large portion of the reason women live longer than men in the present but not previously, is to relate to the fact that a number of significant non-biological elements have changed. What are these changing factors? 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. We can see that every country is above the diagonal parity line - this means in all countries baby girls can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that the advantage of women exists across all countries, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women have a longer life span than men, while in Bhutan the difference is less than half an hour.

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In wealthy countries, the female advantage in longevity was previously smaller.
Let's now look at the way that female advantages in terms of longevity has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the male and كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور - pop over here - female life expectancies at the time of birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both men and women in the US live much, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The gap is getting wider: Although the advantage of women in life expectancy was quite small however, it has grown significantly over time.

By selecting 'Change Country from the chart, determine if these two points are also applicable to other countries that have available data: Sweden, كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور France and the UK.