Why Do 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. Why do women live longer than men in the present, and why does this benefit increase in the past? There isn't much evidence and we're left with only partial solutions. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; However, we're not sure how much the influence to each of these variables is.

We have learned that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. But this isn't due to the fact that certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. The factors changing are numerous. 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 all countries are above the diagonal parity line , which means that in every country that a baby girl can be expected to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that the advantage of women exists everywhere, the country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women are 10 years older than males; while in Bhutan the difference is less than half an hour.

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The advantage of women in life expectancy was smaller in developed countries than it is today.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two areas stand out.

There is an upward trend. Men and اضيق وضعية للجماع women in America have longer lives than they used to 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used to be very small however, it has increased significantly over the course of the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country by country' in the chart, confirm that the two points apply to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.