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 longer than men? Why has this advantage gotten larger over time? The evidence isn't conclusive and we're left with only some answers. While we are aware that there are behavioral, biological and environmental factors that all play a role in women living longer than males, it isn't clear how much each one contributes.

We are aware that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. However this isn't because of certain non-biological aspects have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, 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 - which means that in every country baby girls can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart illustrates that, although women have an advantage across all countries, differences between countries could be significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than males; while in Bhutan the gap is just half a year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in the richer countries than it is today.
Let's examine how the female advantage in life expectancy has changed over time. The following chart shows the life expectancy of males and females when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two distinct points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both 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.

And second, there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be extremely small, ابر التخسيس (click through the following page) but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.

Using the option 'Change country by country' in the chart, you can check that these two points apply to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.