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 why women are more likely to live longer than men? Why has this advantage gotten larger as time passes? There isn't much evidence and we're only able to provide partial answers. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; However, we're not sure how strong the relative contribution to each of these variables is.

It is known that women live longer than males, regardless of weight. But this is not due to the fact that certain 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 other issues 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 over the diagonal line of parity. This means that a newborn girl in all countries can anticipate to live longer than her older brother.

The chart above shows that the advantage of women exists in all countries, country-specific differences are huge. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan there is a difference of less that half a year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
In the richer countries, the advantage of women in longevity used to be smaller
Let's examine how the advantage of women in terms of longevity has changed over time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancies at birth in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two aspects stand out.

First, there's an upward trend. as well as women in the US are living much, much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, the gap is growing: Although the advantage of women in terms of life expectancy was quite small however, it has grown significantly over time.

Using the option 'Change country by country' in the chart, determine if these two points are applicable to other countries that have available information: كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور Sweden, France and the UK.