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 so more than men do today, and why has this advantage increased over time? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to reach a definitive conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; but we don't know exactly how strong the relative contribution of each factor is.

We are aware 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 these changing factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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 women. We can see that all countries are above the line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl in every country can be expected to live for longer than her brother.

The chart below shows that even though women enjoy an advantage everywhere, cross-country differences could be significant. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the difference is just half a year.

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The advantage of women in life expectancy was smaller in developed countries than it is today.
Let's examine how the female advantage in longevity has changed with time. The following chart shows male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US during the time period between 1790 and ابر التخسيس (visit the next internet site) 2014. Two things stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Men and women in the United States live longer than they were a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, the gap is increasing: While the advantage of women in terms of life expectancy was quite small, it has increased substantially in the past.

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.