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's the main reason women have a longer life span than men? What is the reason does this benefit increase over time? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to draw a definitive conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, however, we do not know how significant the impact of each of these factors is.

We have learned that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. But it is not because of certain non-biological aspects have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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 , which means that in every country the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that although the female advantage exists everywhere, the global differences are significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half a calendar year.

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The female advantage in life expectancy was much lower in the richer countries than it is now.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart plots male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct points stand افضل كريم للشعر out.

There is an upward trend. Both genders in America have longer lives than they were 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, افضل كريم للشعر the gap is widening: While the female advantage in life expectancy was once tiny It has significantly increased with time.

When you click on the option "Change country from the chart, you will be able to determine if these two points also apply to the other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.