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 partial evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to support an unambiguous conclusion. Although we know that there are behavioral, biological and environmental variables which all play a part in women who live longer than men, we do not know how much each factor contributes.

It is known that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. But it is not due to the fact that certain non-biological aspects have changed. The factors changing are numerous. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are others that are more intricate. 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 all countries are over the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl in all countries can anticipate to live longer than her older brother.

The chart below shows that although there is a women's advantage across all countries, differences between countries can be 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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The advantage of women in life expectancy was less in developed countries than it is now.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart compares the male and female lifespans at birth in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two things stand افضل شامبو وبلسم (relevant webpage) out.

There is an upward trend. Both men and 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.

Second, there's a widening gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very modest, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.

You can verify that these principles are also applicable to other countries that have data by selecting the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.