Why Do 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's the main reason women have a longer life span than men? And how has this advantage gotten larger over time? The evidence is limited and we only have limited solutions. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; however, we do not know how significant the impact to each of these variables is.

We have learned that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. However this isn't because of certain biological or 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. Other 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 we can see, every country is above the diagonal line of parity - which means that in every country that a baby girl can be expected to live for longer than a new boy.1

This chart shows that, كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام even though women enjoy an advantage in all countries, the differences across countries could be significant. In Russia women are 10 years older than men. In Bhutan the difference is just half an hour.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was smaller in developed countries than it is today.
Let's look at the way that female advantages in longevity has changed over time. The next chart plots the male and female lifespans when they were born in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both genders in America live longer than they were a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used be extremely small however it increased dramatically over the last century.

If you select the option "Change country' on the chart, you can verify that these two points are applicable to the other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.