Why Do Women Have Longer Lives 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 more than men do today and how is this difference growing over time? We only have partial evidence and the evidence is not strong enough to make an unambiguous conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; however, we aren't sure how much the influence of each factor is.

It is known that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. However it is not because of certain biological factors have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are others 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. As we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line - it means that in all nations that a baby girl can be expected to live for longer than a new boy.1

It is interesting to note that, while the advantage for women is present everywhere, cross-country differences are large. In Russia women are 10 years older than men, while in Bhutan the difference is less than half an hour.

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In countries with high incomes, the women's advantage in longevity was previously smaller.
We will now examine how the gender advantage in longevity has changed with time. The next chart compares male and female life expectancy at birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two aspects stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both men and صبغ الشعر بالاسود (sneak a peek at this web-site) 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 getting wider: Although the female advantage in terms of life expectancy was extremely small It has significantly increased over time.

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