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 makes women live more than men do today and how does this benefit increase in the past? There is only limited evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to draw a definitive conclusion. We recognize that biological, اضيق وضعية للجماع behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; but we don't know exactly how much the influence to each of these variables is.

Independently of the exact number of pounds, we know that at least part of the reason why women live longer than men in the present, but not in the past, has to be due to the fact that a number of important non-biological aspects have changed. These are the factors that are changing. Some are well known and اضيق وضعية للجماع 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, all countries are above the diagonal parity line , this means in all countries baby girls can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart illustrates that, even though women enjoy an advantage throughout the world, the differences between countries can be substantial. In Russia, women live 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is just half a year.

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In wealthy countries, the female advantage in longevity was smaller
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the men and women's life expectancies when they were born in the US in the years 1790-2014. Two distinct points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women in the US live much, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be very modest but it increased substantially in the past century.

When you click on the option "Change country in the chart, you can verify that these two points are also applicable to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.