Why Do Women Have Longer Lives 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 much longer than men today and how is this difference growing in the past? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to draw an informed conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and العاب زوجية (click through the up coming internet page) environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, however, we do not know how much the influence of each factor is.

In spite of the precise amount, we can say that at least part of the reason why women live longer than men do today, but not previously, is to have to do with the fact that some 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. Some are more complex. 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. As we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line - this means that in all countries the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a new boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that although the female advantage exists everywhere, the difference between countries is huge. In Russia women live 10 years longer than males; while in Bhutan the gap is less than half each year.

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In rich countries the longevity advantage for women was smaller
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart compares the life expectancy of males and females at birth in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both men as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's a widening gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very modest, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country by country' in the chart, check that these two points also apply to the other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.