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's the reason women live longer than men? And why does this benefit increase in the past? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to draw an unambiguous conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, اضيق وضعية للجماع but we don't know exactly how much the influence of each of these factors is.

In spite of the amount of weight, we are aware that at least part of the reason women live longer than men do today but not previously, has to be due to the fact that some key non-biological factors have changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Some are more complex. For example, اضيق وضعية للجماع 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 over the line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl from every country could anticipate to live longer than her brothers.

Interestingly, this chart shows that, while the advantage for women exists everywhere, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia, women live 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the difference is less that half a year.

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In the richer countries, the advantage of women in longevity used to be smaller
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The chart below shows men and women's life expectancies at the time of birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two areas stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. and women in the US are living much, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The gap is increasing: While the advantage of women in life expectancy was once very small but it has risen significantly with time.

When you click on the option "Change country' on the chart, you are able to determine if these two points apply to the other countries having available information: Sweden, France and the UK.