Why 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 is the reason women have a longer life span than men? And why does this benefit increase over time? The evidence is limited and we only have incomplete answers. While we are aware that there are behavioral, biological and environmental variables that all play a role in women who live longer than men, we do not know how much each one contributes.

Independently of the exact amount, we can say that at least a portion of the reason women live so much longer than men do today but not in the past, is to be due to the fact that several key non-biological factors have changed. The factors changing are numerous. 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, 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 every country is above the diagonal parity line - this means in all countries the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart illustrates that, while there is a female advantage in all countries, the differences across countries are often significant. In Russia women live for علامات الحمل بولد (just click the next web site) 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the gap is just half a year.

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In countries with high incomes, the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart shows the male and female lifespans at birth in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Women and men in the United States live longer than they were 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be extremely small but it increased substantially over the course of the last century.

By selecting 'Change Country in the chart, verify that these two points are also applicable to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.