Why Are Women Living 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 is the reason women live more than men do today and how has this advantage increased in the past? There is only limited evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to draw an absolute conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we aren't sure what the contribution of each factor is.

We have learned that women are living longer than men, regardless of weight. But this isn't due to the fact that certain biological factors have changed. These variables are evolving. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, زيوت تطويل الشعر (glorynote.com said in a blog post) like the fact that men smoke more often. Some 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 over the line of parity diagonally. This means that a newborn girl from every country could anticipate to live longer than her older brother.

This chart shows that, while there is a female advantage everywhere, cross-country differences are often significant. In Russia, women live 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan there is a difference of less that half a year.

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In the richer countries, the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
We will now examine how the advantage of women in longevity has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the time of birth in the US between 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used to be extremely small but it increased substantially over the last century.

It is possible to verify that these points are also applicable to other countries with data by clicking on the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and زيوت تطويل الشعر Sweden.