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 is the reason women live much longer than men today and why is this difference growing over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence is not sufficient to reach an absolute conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, but we don't know exactly what the contribution of each factor is.

We have learned that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. However it is not due to the fact that certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and علامات الحمل بولد - click here now, 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. We can see that every country is above the diagonal parity line - which means that in every country baby girls can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart above shows that the advantage of women exists everywhere, the global differences are significant. In Russia women have a longer life span than men. In Bhutan the difference is less than half an hour.

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The female advantage in life expectancy was less in rich countries that it is today.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancies at birth in the US between 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend: Men as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, the gap is growing: Although the advantage of women in life expectancy was once tiny however, it has grown significantly with time.

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