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. Why do women live more than men do today, and why have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? The evidence is sketchy and we're left with only incomplete solutions. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; but we don't know exactly how significant the impact of each of these factors is.

We know that women are living longer than males, regardless of weight. However this isn't because of certain non-biological factors have changed. The factors changing are numerous. 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, كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور (click through the up coming web site) so advances in medicine that reduced the long-term health burden from infectious diseases, especially for survivors, كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور 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 you can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line , which means that in every country baby girls can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

This chart shows that, even though women enjoy an advantage throughout the world, the differences between countries could be significant. In Russia women are 10 years older than men. In Bhutan the difference is less than half a year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
In rich countries the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below illustrates the male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US during the period 1790 to 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Men and women in the United States live longer than they used to a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used be very small however, it has increased significantly in the past century.

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