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. Why do women live so much longer than men today and why does this benefit increase over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn't sufficient to support a definitive conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; but we don't know exactly what the contribution to each of these variables is.

We are aware that women are living longer than males, regardless of weight. But this is not due to the fact that certain 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, 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 صبغ الشعر بالاسود men and women. As you can see, all countries are above the diagonal line of parity - it means that in all nations baby girls can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart above shows that although the female advantage exists across all countries, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan, the difference is less than half a calendar year.

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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 female advantage in longevity has changed with time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancies at birth in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two aspects stand out.

The first is that 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 widening: While the advantage of women in life expectancy used to be very small, it has increased substantially with time.

You can check if the points you've listed are applicable to other countries that have information by clicking on the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and صبغ الشعر بالاسود Sweden.