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. What makes women live longer than men in the present and how does this benefit increase over time? The evidence isn't conclusive and we only have partial answers. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; however, we aren't sure how strong the relative contribution to each of these variables is.

We are aware that women are living longer than men, ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور regardless of their weight. However, this is not because of certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. These variables are evolving. 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, ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور 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 ; this means in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that although the female advantage exists everywhere, the difference between countries is huge. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan there is a difference of less that half a year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
The advantage for women in terms of life expectancy was lower in rich countries than it is today.
We will now examine how the gender advantage in terms of longevity has changed over time. The next chart shows the life expectancy of males and females at birth in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Women and men living in America are living longer than they were 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 however, it has grown significantly over time.

When you click on the option "Change country in the chart, you will be able to verify that these two points also apply to the other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.