Why Do 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 is the reason women have a longer life span than men? Why the advantage has grown as time passes? We only have partial evidence and the evidence is not strong enough to make an informed conclusion. Although we know that there are behavioral, biological, and environmental factors which play a significant role in women's longevity more than males, we aren't sure how much each one contributes.

It is known that women are living longer than men, regardless of weight. However this isn't due to the fact that certain 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 علامات الحمل بولد women. We can see that every country is above the diagonal line of parity. This means that a newborn girl in all countries can be expected to live for longer than her younger brother.

Interestingly, this chart shows that while the female advantage exists everywhere, the country-specific differences are huge. In Russia, علامات الحمل بولد women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the difference is only half a year.

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In wealthy countries, the advantage of women in longevity used to be smaller
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below illustrates the male and female life expectancy at the birth in the US in the years 1790 until 2014. Two areas stand out.

There is an upward trend. Women and men in the United States live longer than they used to 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is a widening gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used be extremely small, but it grew substantially during the last century.

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