Why Are Women Living 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? And how the advantage has grown as time passes? There isn't much evidence and we're only able to provide some solutions. While we are aware that there are behavioral, biological, and environmental factors that play an integral role in women's longevity more than men, we do not know how much each factor contributes.

We know that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. However, this is not due to the fact that certain biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others are more complex. For example, كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام 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 every country can anticipate to live longer than her older brother.

This chart is interesting in that it shows that, while the advantage for women is present everywhere, cross-country differences are large. In Russia, women live 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is only half a year.

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In countries with high incomes, the longevity advantage for women was smaller
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart plots male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

First, there's an upward trend: Men and women in the US are living much, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is a widening gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very small, but it grew substantially over the last century.

By selecting 'Change Country by country' in the chart, you will be able to confirm that the two points also apply to the other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.