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 so much longer than men today and why does this benefit increase over time? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn't strong enough to make an unambiguous conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, صبغ الشعر بالاسود However, we're not sure how much the influence to each of these variables is.

We are aware that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. However this is not because of certain non-biological factors have changed. These are the factors that 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 women. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal parity line , it means that in all nations baby girls can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that while the female advantage exists across all countries, the global differences are significant. In Russia, women live 10 years more than men. In Bhutan, صبغ الشعر بالاسود the difference is less than half a calendar year.

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In rich countries the women's advantage in longevity was not as great.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed over time. The chart below shows men and women's life expectancies at the birth in the US during the period 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Both men as well as women in the US have a much longer life span longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very small however it increased dramatically over the course of the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country' on the chart, confirm that the two points apply to other countries that have available information: Sweden, France and the UK.