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 much longer than men today and why has this advantage increased over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence is not sufficient to reach an unambiguous conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we do not know how much the influence of each one of these factors is.

We know that women are living longer than males, كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور regardless of weight. But this is not due to the fact that certain non-biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are others that are more intricate. For example, كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور 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. It is clear that every country is above the line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl from any country can anticipate to live longer than her brothers.

This chart is interesting in that it shows that, while the advantage for women is present everywhere, cross-country differences are large. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the difference is less that half a year.

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In countries with high incomes, the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's examine the way that female advantages in terms of longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two things stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. and 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.

Second, there's a widening gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be very small, but it grew substantially in the past century.

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