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 is the reason women live longer than men in the present, and why is this difference growing in the past? We only have partial evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to draw 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, but we don't know exactly how much the influence to each of these variables is.

In spite of how much amount, we can say that a large portion of the reason why women live longer than men do today but not previously, has to do with the fact that some significant non-biological elements have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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 كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام women. As we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line - it means that in all nations a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that while the female advantage is present everywhere, global differences are significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men, while in Bhutan the gap is just half a year.

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In wealthy countries, the women's advantage in longevity used to be smaller
Let's now look at how the advantage of women in terms of longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the life expectancy of males and females at birth in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Both genders in the United States live longer than they used to 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used be extremely small but it increased substantially during the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country by country' in the chart, you are able to determine if these two points are also applicable to the other countries having available information: Sweden, France and the UK.