Why Women 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. What's the main reason women are more likely to live longer than men? And how has this advantage gotten larger in the past? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to reach an informed conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, but we don't know exactly what the contribution to each of these variables is.

In spite of how much amount, we can say that at least part of the reason women live longer than men do today but not in the past, has to be due to the fact that several 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. Certain 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 we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line , it means that in all nations baby girls can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart above shows that although the female advantage is present everywhere, global differences are significant. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the difference is only half a year.

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In wealthy countries, the longevity advantage for women was smaller
Let's examine the way that female advantages in longevity has changed with time. The next chart compares the male and female lifespans at birth in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two things stand out.

First, اوضاع الجماع there's an upward trend. Men as well as women in the US have a much longer life span 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 an increasing gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used to be quite small however, it has increased significantly over the last century.

If you select the option "Change country in the chart, verify that these two points also apply to the other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.