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 makes women live longer than men in the present, and why has this advantage increased over time? The evidence is limited and we have only incomplete solutions. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, However, we're not sure how much the influence of each factor is.

Independently of the exact amount of weight, we are aware that at least part of the reason why women live so much longer than men, but not in the past, has to be due to the fact that several significant non-biological elements have changed. These factors are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Other 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 ابر التخسيس women. We can see that every country is above the diagonal parity line , this means that in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart illustrates that, while there is a female advantage throughout the world, the differences between countries can be significant. In Russia women have a longer life span than men; in Bhutan the difference is less than half a year.

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The advantage for women in terms of life expectancy was lower in countries with higher incomes than it is today.
We will now examine how the advantage of women in longevity has changed with time. The chart below illustrates the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at birth in the US in the years 1790 until 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women in America 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 widening: While the female advantage in life expectancy was extremely small It has significantly increased with time.

If you select the option "Change country by country' in the chart, you are able to confirm that the two points are applicable to the other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.