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. Why do women live longer than men and how has this advantage increased over time? The evidence isn't conclusive and we have only limited answers. While we are aware that there are biological, psychological, صبغ الشعر بالاسود and environmental factors that all play a role in women who live longer than men, we do not know how much each factor contributes.

We have learned that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. But this is not because of certain non-biological aspects have changed. What are these factors that have changed? Some are well known and صبغ الشعر بالاسود 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. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl from any country can expect to live longer than her brothers.

The chart below shows that while there is a female advantage everywhere, cross-country differences are often significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than males; while in Bhutan the difference is just half one year.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was smaller in developed countries than it is today.
We will now examine how the female advantage in longevity has changed with time. The next chart compares the life expectancy of males and females at birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.

First, there's an upward trend. and women in the US are living 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 growing: Although the female advantage in terms of life expectancy was tiny however, it has grown significantly over time.

When you click on the option "Change country by country' in the chart, you can check that these two points also apply to other countries that have available information: Sweden, France and the UK.