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 is the reason women are more likely to live longer than men? And why the advantage has grown over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence is not sufficient to support an informed conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, however, we aren't sure how significant the impact to each of these variables is.

We are aware that women live longer than males, regardless of weight. However, this is not due to the fact that certain biological factors have changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Other 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. As you can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line ; which means that in every country a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart shows that, although women have an advantage everywhere, cross-country differences can be substantial. In Russia women live 10 years more than males. In Bhutan the difference is less than half a calendar year.

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The advantage of women in life expectancy was less in rich countries than it is today.
We will now examine the way that female advantages in longevity has changed with time. The following chart shows the life expectancy of males and females when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both genders in America live longer than they used to 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is an increase in the gap between men and women: ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very small however, it has increased significantly over the last century.

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