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? Why the advantage has grown over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence is not sufficient to support an absolute conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we do not know how strong the relative contribution to each of these variables is.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that at least part of the reason why women live longer than men do today, but not in the past, has to have to do with the fact that certain important non-biological aspects have changed. What are these factors that have changed? 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 تحاميل مهبلية 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 you can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line , it means that in all nations the newborn girl is likely to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

It is interesting to note that, while the advantage for women exists across all countries, تحاميل مهبلية the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the gap is less that half a year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in developed countries than it is today.
We will now examine how the female advantage in longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the male and female life expectancies at the birth in the US between 1790 until 2014. Two points stand out.

There is an upward trend: Men as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did 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 life expectancy was very small however, it has grown significantly over time.

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