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? Why the advantage has grown over time? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to draw an informed conclusion. Although we know that there are biological, behavioral and environmental factors that play an integral role in women living longer than males, it isn't clear how much each one contributes.

In spite of how much amount, we can say that at least a portion of the reason women live so much longer than men in the present and not in the past, is to have to do with the fact that several fundamental non-biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are others that are more intricate. 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 all countries are above the line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl in all countries can be expected to live for longer than her brother.

This graph shows that although women have an advantage in all countries, the differences across countries can be significant. In Russia, زيوت تطويل الشعر women live 10 years more than males. In Bhutan, the difference is less than half a calendar year.

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In rich countries the advantage of women 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 gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the birth in the US during the period 1790 until 2014. Two distinct 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.

The second is that there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be extremely small however it increased dramatically during the last century.

If you select the option "Change country' on the chart, you can check that these two points apply to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.