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. Why do women live so longer than men, and why does this benefit increase in the past? There isn't much evidence and we have only incomplete answers. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; but we don't know exactly how significant the impact to each of these variables is.

In spite of how much number of pounds, we know that a large portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men today however not as in the past, is to be due to the fact that certain significant non-biological elements have changed. The factors changing are numerous. 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 every country is over the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl in every country can anticipate to live longer than her older brother.

This chart shows that, while there is a female advantage across all countries, differences between countries can be significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men; in Bhutan the gap is less than half an hour.

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In countries with high incomes, the female advantage in longevity used to be smaller
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart plots the life expectancy of males and females at birth in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two areas 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.

And زيوت تطويل الشعر second, there is an increase in the gap between men and women: زيوت تطويل الشعر (Recommended Web page) female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be quite small, but it grew substantially during the last century.

It is possible to verify that these are applicable to other countries that have data by selecting the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.