Why Women Live 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? And why the advantage has grown as time passes? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn't strong enough to make an unambiguous conclusion. While we are aware that there are behavioral, biological and environmental variables that all play a role in women living longer than men, we don't know how much each one contributes.

In spite of how much amount, we can say that at least part of the reason why women live so much longer than men do today and not in the past, is to do with the fact that certain key non-biological factors have changed. These variables are evolving. Some are well known and صبغ الشعر بالاسود relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Some are more complex. 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 every country is above the diagonal line of parity. This means that a newborn girl in every country can be expected to live for longer than her brother.

This chart is interesting in that it shows that although the female advantage exists across all countries, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women are 10 years older than males; while in Bhutan the gap is just half one year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
In the richer countries, the women's advantage in longevity used to be smaller
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the male and صبغ الشعر بالاسود female life expectancy at the birth in the US during the period 1790-2014. Two specific points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Men and women living in America are living longer than they were 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's an increasing gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used to be very modest, but it grew substantially during the last century.

It is possible to verify that these points are also applicable to other countries that have information by clicking on the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.