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's the reason women are more likely to live longer than men? And why has this advantage gotten larger over time? The evidence isn't conclusive and we only have incomplete solutions. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, however, we aren't sure how much the influence of each factor is.

It is known that women live longer than males, regardless of weight. However this is not due to the fact that certain biological or 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. Certain 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 زيوت تطويل الشعر women. As you can see, every country is above the diagonal line of parity - which means that in every country baby girls can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that although the female advantage exists across all countries, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia, women live 10 years more than males. In Bhutan the gap is only half a year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
The advantage of women in life expectancy was less in developed countries than it is now.
Let's examine how the advantage of women in longevity has changed with time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancies at the birth in the US in the years 1790-2014. Two specific points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and زيوت تطويل الشعر women in the United States live longer than they were 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be quite small but it increased substantially during the last century.

By selecting 'Change Country by country' in the chart, you will be able to verify that these two points apply to the other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.