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 makes women live more than men do today and how has this advantage increased in the past? We only have a few clues and the evidence is not sufficient to reach an absolute conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور However, we're not sure how strong the relative contribution of each factor is.

We have learned that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. But this isn't because of certain biological or 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. 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. As you can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line ; which means that in every country a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that the advantage of women is present everywhere, difference between countries is huge. In Russia women are 10 years older than males; while in Bhutan the difference is less than half a year.

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The female advantage in terms of life expectancy was lower in the richer countries than it is now.
Let's now look at how the gender advantage in longevity has changed over time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two specific points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both 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 gap is getting wider: Although the female advantage in life expectancy was once tiny It has significantly increased with time.

By selecting 'Change Country by country' in the chart, verify that these two points also apply to other countries that have available data: ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور Sweden, France and the UK.