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 why women live longer than men? Why the advantage has grown over time? The evidence is limited and we're only able to provide partial answers. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we aren't sure how strong the relative contribution of each factor is.

In spite of how much number of pounds, we know that a large portion of the reason women live longer than men in the present, but not previously, is to have to do with the fact that several fundamental non-biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? 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. As we can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line , اضيق وضعية للجماع this means that in all countries baby girls can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart below shows that while there is a female advantage in all countries, the differences across countries can be significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is just half an hour.

__S.17__
__S.19__
In the richer countries, the female advantage in longevity was not as great.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancy at the birth in the US in the years 1790 until 2014. Two things stand out.

There is an upward trend. Men and women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did 100 years 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 quite small, but it grew substantially over the last century.

Using the option 'Change country by country' in the chart, you can verify that these two points are applicable to other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.