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's the reason women are more likely to live longer than men? And why has this advantage gotten larger in the past? The evidence isn't conclusive and we're only able to provide limited solutions. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; however, we aren't sure how significant the impact of each one of these factors is.

In spite of the precise amount, we can say that at least a portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men do today, but not in the past, has to do with the fact that several fundamental non-biological factors have changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are others that are more intricate. For العاب زوجية 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 , it means that in all nations the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart above shows that while the female advantage is present everywhere, cross-country differences are large. In Russia, women live 10 years more than males. In Bhutan the difference is just half a year.

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In the richer countries, the female advantage in longevity was smaller
Let's look at how the advantage of women in terms of longevity has changed over time. The next chart compares male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Both men as well as women in the US live much, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is a widening gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very modest, but it grew substantially in the past century.

By selecting 'Change Country from the chart, check that these two points are applicable to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.