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's the main reason women have a longer life span than men? And why the advantage has grown as time passes? The evidence is limited and we have only some answers. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, However, we're not sure how strong the relative contribution of each factor is.

We have learned that women are living longer than males, regardless of weight. However this is not because of certain non-biological factors have changed. What are these factors that have changed? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, زيوت تطويل الشعر like the fact that men smoke more often. Other 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, 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, every country is above the diagonal parity line - it means that in all nations baby girls can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

This chart illustrates that, although there is a women's advantage in all countries, the differences across countries could be significant. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan, the difference is only half a year.

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In wealthy countries, the advantage of women in longevity was previously smaller.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart plots male and female life expectancy at birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.

First, there's an upward trend: Men and women in the US live much, much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The gap is increasing: While the female advantage in life expectancy was once very small, it has increased substantially with time.

Using the option 'Change country by country' in the chart, confirm that the two points also apply to the other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.