Why Women Are More Likely To 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 much longer than men today and how is this difference growing in the past? The evidence isn't conclusive and we're only able to provide incomplete answers. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, However, we're not sure how much the influence of each of these factors is.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that a large portion of the reason why women live longer than men do today but not previously, is to relate to the fact that some significant non-biological elements have changed. What are these factors that have changed? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others are more complicated. 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, all countries are above the diagonal parity line ; this means in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

The chart above shows that although the female advantage exists everywhere, اوضاع الجماع the country-specific differences are huge. In Russia, women live 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the difference is less than half a calendar year.

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In the richer countries, the female advantage in longevity was previously smaller.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the birth in the US from 1790 until 2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women in America have longer lives than they did 100 years 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 life expectancy used to be extremely small, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.

By selecting 'Change Country from the chart, you will be able to verify that these two points are applicable to the other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.