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 is the reason women live longer than men? And why has this advantage gotten larger as time passes? We only have a few clues and افضل كريم للشعر the evidence isn't strong enough to make an absolute conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, but we don't know exactly how significant the impact to each of these variables is.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that at a minimum, the reason why women live so much longer than men however not as in the past, has to relate to the fact that certain significant non-biological elements have changed. These are the factors that are changing. 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 men and افضل كريم للشعر women. We can see that every country is above the diagonal parity line ; this means that in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that while the female advantage is present everywhere, country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women have a longer life span than men; in Bhutan the difference is just half each year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
The female advantage in terms of life expectancy was lower in the richer countries than it is now.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart shows the male and female lifespans at birth in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two specific points stand out.

First, there's an upward trend. Both men and women in the US live much, much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

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

It is possible to verify that these points are also applicable to other countries that have data by clicking the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.