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 so more than men do today and why does this benefit increase in the past? There is only limited evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to support an unambiguous conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; however, we do not know how significant the impact of each factor is.

We have learned that women live longer than males, regardless of weight. But this isn't because of certain biological or اضيق وضعية للجماع non-biological factors have changed. These 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. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal parity line , this means in all countries that a baby girl can be expected to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart illustrates that, although there is a women's advantage throughout the world, the differences between countries can be significant. In Russia women have a longer life span than males; while in Bhutan the difference is less than half each year.

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The advantage of women in terms of life expectancy was lower in the richer countries than it is today.
We will now examine how the female advantage in terms of longevity has changed over time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancy at the time of birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two areas stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both genders in the United States live longer than they used to 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, the gap is widening: While the female advantage in life expectancy used to be extremely small, it has increased substantially over time.

By selecting 'Change Country from the chart, confirm that the two points apply to other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.