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. What makes women live much longer than men today and why has this advantage increased in the past? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn't strong enough to make an informed conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; However, صبغ الشعر بالاسود we're not sure what the contribution of each factor is.

In spite of how much amount of weight, we are aware that at least a portion of the reason women live so much longer than men today, but not previously, has to be due to the fact that a number of important non-biological aspects have changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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. 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 longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart shows that, although there is a women's advantage in all countries, the differences across countries can be substantial. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the difference is less that half a year.

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In countries with high incomes, the female advantage in longevity was not as great.
We will now examine how the female advantage in life expectancy has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy when they were born in the US during the period 1790 to 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

There is an upward trend. Men and women in the United States live longer than they were 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be extremely small however, it has increased significantly in the past century.

You can check if these are applicable to other countries with data by selecting the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.