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 is the reason women have a longer life span than men? Why has this advantage gotten larger in the past? The evidence is sketchy and we're only able to provide limited answers. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; but we don't know exactly how significant the impact of each one of these factors is.

In spite of the weight, we know that at least a portion of the reason why women live longer than men and not previously, has to do with the fact that some key non-biological factors have changed. What are these new 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, 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, all countries are above the diagonal parity line - this means that in all countries that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a new boy.1

This chart shows that, although women have an advantage in all countries, the differences across countries could be significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the gap is just half each year.

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In countries with high incomes, the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two points stand علامات الحمل بولد out.

First, there's an upward trend. Men and women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did 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 life expectancy used be quite small however it increased dramatically in the past century.

By selecting 'Change Country by country' in the chart, you can verify that these two points apply to the other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.