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 women live longer than men? And why is this difference growing as time passes? The evidence isn't conclusive and we're only able to provide partial answers. We know that behavioral, ابر التخسيس biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, but we don't know exactly how strong the relative contribution of each factor is.

We know that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. However this isn't due to the fact that certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. These variables are evolving. Some are well known and ابر التخسيس relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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. We can see that every country is above the diagonal line of parity - this means in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

It is interesting to note that although the female advantage is present everywhere, difference between countries is huge. In Russia women live 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the difference is less that half a year.

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The advantage of women in life expectancy was smaller in countries with higher incomes as compared to the present.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the male and female life expectancies at the birth in the US in the years 1790 to 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. as well as women in the US live much, 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 ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used to be very small however it increased dramatically over the last century.

If you select the option "Change country in the chart, you can verify that these two points also apply to the other countries having available information: Sweden, France and the UK.