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 makes women live longer than men and why does this benefit increase in the past? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn't sufficient to reach an informed conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; however, we aren't sure what the contribution of each factor is.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that a large portion of the reason why women live longer than men in the present, but not previously, has to have to do with the fact that a number of important non-biological aspects have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and اوضاع الجماع 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, every country is above the diagonal parity line ; which means that in every country the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a newborn boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that while the female advantage exists in all countries, difference between countries is huge. In Russia women live 10 years longer than males; while in Bhutan the difference is just half an hour.

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In the richer countries, the advantage of women in longevity was not as great.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart compares male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two specific points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. as well as 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, the gap is getting wider: Although the advantage of women in terms of life expectancy was tiny however, it has grown significantly with time.

Using the option 'Change country by country' in the chart, check that these two points also apply to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and اوضاع الجماع (glorynote.com) the UK.