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 so longer than men and how have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? There is only limited evidence and تحاميل مهبلية the evidence isn't sufficient to support an absolute conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors 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 of these factors is.

In spite of how much amount, we can say that a large portion of the reason women live so much longer than men do today, but not previously, has to be due to the fact that some important non-biological aspects have changed. These are the factors that are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, 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 تحاميل مهبلية 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 that in all countries baby girls can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart below shows that even though women enjoy an advantage everywhere, cross-country differences can be substantial. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the gap is just half a year.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was less in the richer countries that it is today.
Let's look at how the advantage of women in longevity has changed with time. The next chart compares the life expectancy of males and females when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.

There is an upward trend. Men 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.

Second, the gap is increasing: While the female advantage in life expectancy used to be extremely small but it has risen significantly with time.

When you click on the option "Change country in the chart, check that these two points also apply to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.