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's the main reason women are more likely to live longer than men? And how does this benefit increase as time passes? There is only limited evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to draw an unambiguous conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; However, we're not sure how strong the relative contribution of each factor is.

It is known that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. However, this is not due to the fact that certain biological or 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. 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 - it means that in all nations that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart shows that, even though women enjoy an advantage everywhere, cross-country differences are often significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than males; while in Bhutan the gap is just half each year.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was less in the richer countries than it is now.
Let's examine how the female advantage in longevity has changed over time. The next chart plots male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Men as well as women in the US live much, صبغ الشعر بالاسود (glorynote.com) much longer today than a century 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 quite small however it increased dramatically during the last century.

Using the option 'Change country in the chart, you can verify that these two points also apply to the other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.