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 are more likely to live longer than men? Why is this difference growing as time passes? There is only limited evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to support an informed conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام however, we do not know how much the influence of each one of these factors is.

In spite of the weight, we know that at least part of the reason women live longer than men in the present however not as previously, has to have to do with the fact that some key 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. Some 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 , this means in all countries that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a newborn boy.1

It is interesting to note that although the female advantage exists in all countries, global differences are significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than males; while in Bhutan the gap is just half a year.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was less in the richer countries than it is today.
We will now examine the way that female advantages in life expectancy has changed over time. The following chart shows male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two areas stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Women and men in the United States live 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 terms of life expectancy used be very small however, it has increased significantly during the last century.

You can confirm that these points are also applicable to other countries with data by clicking the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام France, and Sweden.