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 much longer than men today, and why does this benefit increase over time? We only have partial evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to draw an absolute conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, However, we're not sure what the contribution of each factor is.

We have learned that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. But this isn't due to the fact that certain non-biological aspects have changed. These variables are evolving. 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, اوضاع الجماع 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 اوضاع الجماع women. We can see that every country is above the diagonal parity line , which means that in every country the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a newborn boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that the advantage of women exists across all countries, the global differences are significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the difference is just half each year.

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The advantage for women in terms of life expectancy was lower in rich countries as compared to the present.
Let's look at how the gender advantage in life expectancy has changed over time. The next chart plots male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.

First, there's an upward trend. Men as well as women in the US have a much longer life span longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The gap is widening: While the advantage of women in life expectancy was once very small however, it has grown significantly with time.

When you click on the option "Change country' on the chart, confirm that the two points are applicable to the other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.