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. Why do women live more than men do today and how does this benefit increase over time? There isn't much evidence and we're only able to provide some answers. Although we know that there are biological, behavioral and environmental variables that all play a role in women living longer than men, we don't know what percentage each factor plays in.

In spite of the precise number of pounds, we know that at least part of the reason why women live so much longer than men in the present, but not in the past, has to relate to the fact that a number of key non-biological factors have changed. These factors are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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. As we can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line ; which means that in every country baby girls can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart shows that, although women have an advantage everywhere, cross-country differences could be significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is just half a year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was much lower in rich countries than it is today.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the male and female lifespans when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two points stand ابر التخسيس out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both genders in America live longer than they were 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be extremely small, but it grew substantially over the last century.

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