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. What's the main reason women have a longer life span than men? What is the reason is this difference growing as time passes? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn't strong enough to make a definitive conclusion. We know there are behavioral, biological as well as environmental factors which play a significant role in women who live longer than males, it isn't clear what percentage each factor plays in.

Independently of the exact amount of weight, we are aware that at least a portion of the reason women live so much longer than men but not in the past, has to be due to the fact that some fundamental non-biological factors have changed. What are these new factors? 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 اوضاع الجماع men and women. We can see that every country is above the diagonal parity line , this means that in all countries baby girls can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

It is interesting to note that, while the advantage for women exists in all countries, اوضاع الجماع global differences are significant. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half a calendar year.

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In rich countries the female advantage in longevity was previously smaller.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart shows the life expectancy of males and females when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

First, there's an upward trend. Men as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in life expectancy used be quite small but it increased substantially over the last century.

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