Why Do 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. Why do women live more than men do today and how have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to reach 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 what the contribution of each one of these factors is.

In spite of the precise amount of weight, we are aware that at a minimum, the reason women live so much longer than men today, but not in the past, is to relate to the fact that a number of key non-biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are other issues that are more intricate. 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 افضل شامبو وبلسم 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 line of parity - this means in all countries baby girls can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart shows that, while there is a female advantage throughout the world, the differences between countries can be substantial. In Russia women live 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the gap is only half a year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
In rich countries the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's look at how the female advantage in life expectancy has changed over time. The next chart shows the life expectancy of males and females when they were born in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women living in America are living longer than they were a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

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

By selecting 'Change Country from the chart, you are able to check that these two points apply to other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.