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 so longer than men in the present, and why has this advantage increased over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence is not strong enough to make an unambiguous conclusion. While we are aware that there are behavioral, biological, and environmental factors that all play a role in women living longer than men, we do not know how much each factor contributes.

We have learned that women are living longer than males, regardless of weight. But, this is not due to the fact that certain non-biological aspects have changed. These variables are evolving. Some are well known and تحاميل مهبلية relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are others that are more intricate. 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 - which means that in every country that a baby girl can be expected to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

It is interesting to note that the advantage of women exists everywhere, the country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women have a longer life span than men; in Bhutan the difference is less than half a year.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was much lower in the richer countries than it is now.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the time of birth in the US between 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.

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

Second, there's an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in life expectancy used to be extremely small but it increased substantially in the past century.

You can verify that these are applicable to other countries that have data by selecting the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.