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. What is the reason women live longer than men in the present and how is this difference growing over time? The evidence isn't conclusive and we only have partial solutions. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; but we don't know exactly how significant the impact of each of these factors is.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that at least part of the reason women live longer than men do today and not in the past, has to have to do with the fact that several significant non-biological elements 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 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 اضيق وضعية للجماع men and women. As you can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line - it means that in all nations the newborn girl is likely to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart below shows that even though women enjoy an advantage everywhere, cross-country differences can be substantial. In Russia women have a longer life span than men, while in Bhutan the difference is less than half a year.

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The advantage of women in life expectancy was less in rich countries than it is today.
We will now examine how the female advantage in longevity has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the time of birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two areas stand out.

First, there is an upward trend: Men as well as women in the US live much, much longer than they did 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 extremely small but it increased substantially over the course of the last century.

You can verify that the points you've listed are applicable to other countries with information by clicking on the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.