Why Do Women Have Longer Lives 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 why is this difference growing in the past? There isn't much evidence and we're only able to provide partial answers. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we do not know how significant the impact of each one of these factors is.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that at a minimum, the reason why women live so much longer than men and not in the past, has to be due to the fact that certain significant non-biological elements have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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 men and women. We can see that every country is above the diagonal line of parity - this means in all countries baby girls can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that, while the advantage for women exists everywhere, the global differences are significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half one year.

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The female advantage in life expectancy was smaller in rich countries than it is today.
Let's look at the way that female advantages in longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows male and female life expectancies at birth in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two specific points stand صبغ الشعر بالاسود (https://glorynote.com/) out.

There is an upward trend. Men and women in America live longer than they did a century 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 to be quite small but it increased substantially over the course of the last century.

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