Why Women Are More Likely To 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 women have a longer life span than men? What is the reason the advantage has grown as time passes? We only have partial evidence and the evidence is not strong enough to make a definitive conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer lives than men, however, we aren't sure how strong the relative contribution of each one of these factors is.

It is known that women are living longer than males, regardless of weight. However it is not because of certain non-biological aspects have changed. What are these changing factors? 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, العاب زوجية, Click On this website, 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. It is clear that every country is above the line of parity diagonally. This means that a newborn girl from any country can anticipate to live longer than her brother.

This chart shows that, although there is a women's advantage everywhere, cross-country differences can be substantial. In Russia women have a longer life span than men; in Bhutan the gap is less than half a year.

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The female advantage in terms of life expectancy was lower in countries with higher incomes that it is today.
We will now examine the way that female advantages in longevity has changed with time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancy at birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.

First, there's an upward trend. Men as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be very modest however, it has increased significantly over the course of the last century.

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