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. What is the reason women are more likely to live longer than men? Why has this advantage gotten larger as time passes? The evidence isn't conclusive and we're only able to provide partial solutions. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, however, we do not know how much the influence of each of these factors is.

We know that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. But this isn't due to the fact that certain non-biological aspects have changed. These factors are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Certain 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, تحاميل مهبلية 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 over the diagonal line of parity. This means that a newborn girl from every country could be expected to live for longer than her brother.

The chart above shows that the advantage of women exists across all countries, the global differences are significant. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is just half a year.

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The advantage of women in life expectancy was less in countries with higher incomes than it is today.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the male and female life expectancy at the time of birth in the US in the years 1790 to 2014. Two aspects stand out.

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

And second, there is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be quite small however, it has increased significantly over the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country from the chart, verify that these two points are also applicable to the other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.