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. What is the reason women live longer than men? And why is this difference growing as time passes? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to reach a definitive conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; however, we aren't sure how significant the impact to each of these variables is.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that a large portion of the reason women live longer than men and not in the past, has to have to do with the fact that some key non-biological factors 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 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, تحاميل مهبلية 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 line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl from every country could expect to live longer than her younger brother.

The chart below shows that while there is a female advantage everywhere, cross-country differences can be substantial. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men, while in Bhutan the gap is just half an hour.

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The female advantage in life expectancy was much lower in countries with higher incomes than it is now.
We will now examine how the gender advantage in longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the men and women's life expectancies at the time of birth in the US from 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

First, there's an upward trend. and women in the US are living much, much longer than they did 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 life expectancy used be very modest but it increased substantially during the last century.

If you select the option "Change country by country' in the chart, you are able to verify that these two points also apply to other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.