Why 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. Why do women live longer than men in the present and why does this benefit increase in the past? We only have partial evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to draw an informed conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, but we don't know exactly how significant the impact to each of these variables 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. These variables are evolving. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are others 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 men and women. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal parity line , this means that in all countries that a baby girl can be expected to live for longer than a new boy.1

The chart below shows that although there is a women's advantage everywhere, cross-country differences can be significant. In Russia women live 10 years more than males. In Bhutan the difference is less that half a year.

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The advantage for ابر التخسيس women in terms of life expectancy was lower in developed countries than it is now.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the men and women's life expectancies at the birth in the US during the period 1790 until 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men as well as women in the US are living much, much longer today than 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 be extremely small however it increased dramatically over the course of the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country' on the chart, you will be able to determine if these two points are also applicable to other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.