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 much longer than men today, and why have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to reach a definitive conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; but we don't know exactly how significant the impact of each of these factors is.

In spite of the weight, we know that a large portion 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 significant non-biological elements have changed. These variables are evolving. 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, صبغ الشعر بالاسود 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 line of parity - this means in all countries the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a newborn boy.1

It is interesting to note that the advantage of women exists in all countries, cross-country differences are large. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men; in Bhutan the difference is less than half each year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in the richer countries than it is today.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The following chart shows the men and women's life expectancies when they were born in the US in the years 1790 to 2014. Two specific points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Men and women in the US live a lot, صبغ الشعر بالاسود much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be quite small however, it has increased significantly in the past 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 other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.