Why Are Women Living 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 longer than men, and why has this advantage increased in the past? There isn't much evidence and we're left with only incomplete solutions. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; However, we're not sure what the contribution of each one of these factors is.

We know that women are living longer than men, regardless of weight. But this is not due to the fact that certain biological factors have changed. These are the factors that are changing. Some are well known and افضل كريم للشعر relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Other are more complicated. For example, افضل كريم للشعر 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 every country is above the diagonal parity line ; this means that in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart above shows that while the female advantage is present everywhere, difference between countries is huge. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half a year.

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In wealthy countries, the women's advantage in longevity was smaller
Let's now look at how the gender advantage in terms of longevity has changed over time. The chart below shows gender-based and female-specific life expectancy when they were born in the US between 1790-2014. Two distinct points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both 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.

And second, there is a widening gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be extremely small however, it has increased significantly over the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country' on the chart, you are able to verify that these two points are also applicable to the other countries having available information: Sweden, France and the UK.