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 reason women have a longer life span than men? And how the advantage has grown in the past? The evidence is limited and we have only incomplete answers. Although we know that there are biological, psychological, and environmental factors which play a significant role in women who live longer than men, we do not know how much each factor contributes.

We are aware that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. However, this is not due to the fact that certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. These variables are evolving. Some are well known and ابر التخسيس (read) 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 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 - which means that in every country that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a new boy.1

This chart illustrates that, while there is a female advantage across all countries, differences between countries are often significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than males; while in Bhutan the gap is less than half one year.

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In countries with high incomes, the women's advantage in longevity was previously smaller.
We will now examine how the female advantage in longevity has changed with time. The next chart shows the life expectancy of males and females at birth in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend: Men as well as women in the US live much, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in life expectancy used be extremely small but it increased substantially during the last century.

If you select the option "Change country by country' in the chart, you are able to verify that these two points apply to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.