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 more than men do today and how have these advantages gotten bigger over time? The evidence is sketchy and we have only partial answers. We recognize that biological, behavioral and اوضاع الجماع environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; however, we aren't sure what the contribution of each one of these factors is.

We have learned that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. But, this is not due to the fact that certain biological factors have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are other issues 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, 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 for longer than a new boy.1

It is interesting to note that the advantage of women exists across all countries, اوضاع الجماع the cross-country differences are large. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan, the difference is less than half a calendar year.

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In the richer countries, the longevity advantage for women was smaller
Let's examine the way that female advantages in life expectancy has changed over time. The following chart shows male and female life expectancies at birth in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Women and men in America have longer lives than they used to 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be quite small but it increased substantially in the past century.

When you click on the option "Change country in the chart, you are able to check that these two points are also applicable to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.