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 reason why women live longer than men? And why is this difference growing in the past? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence is not strong enough to make an absolute conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and اوضاع الجماع environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we do not know how strong the relative contribution of each of these factors is.

In spite of the amount, we can say that at least a portion of the reason women live so much longer than men do today and not in the past, has to relate to the fact that several 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. Some 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, اوضاع الجماع 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 - it means that in all nations baby girls can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that although the female advantage is present everywhere, global differences are significant. In Russia, women live 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the difference is just half a year.

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In rich countries the women's advantage in longevity was previously smaller.
Let's look at how the gender advantage in life expectancy has changed over time. The next chart compares male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two aspects stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women living in America are living longer than they used to 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 small however, it has increased significantly over the course of the last century.

You can verify that these points are also applicable to other countries with information by clicking on the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.