Why 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 so longer than men in the present and how has this advantage increased over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence is not sufficient to reach a definitive conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; but we don't know exactly how much the influence to each of these variables is.

We are aware that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. But it is not because of certain non-biological factors have changed. What are these factors that have changed? 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, علامات الحمل بولد 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 , it means that in all nations that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a new boy.1

The chart above shows that while the female advantage exists everywhere, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan there is a difference of less that half a year.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was smaller in developed countries as compared to the present.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The following chart shows the male and female life expectancy at the birth in the US during the period 1790 until 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

There is an upward trend. Women and men living in America are living longer than they were a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used be very small however it increased dramatically over the course of the last century.

Using the option 'Change country by country' in the chart, determine if these two points also apply to other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.