Why Do Women Have Longer Lives 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 more than men do today and how have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to reach an absolute conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; However, we're not sure how strong the relative contribution to each of these variables is.

In spite of the precise amount, we can say that at a minimum, the reason women live longer than men today and not in the past, is to relate to the fact that some key non-biological factors have changed. These are the factors that are changing. 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. As we can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line , this means 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 although the female advantage exists in all countries, difference between countries is huge. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan, the difference is only half a year.

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The female advantage in terms of life expectancy was lower in developed countries as compared to the present.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the men and women's life expectancies at the time of birth in the US during the period 1790 to 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

There is an upward trend. and اضيق وضعية للجماع (click through the up coming web page) 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.

Second, there's an increasing gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used be very small, اضيق وضعية للجماع but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.

Using the option 'Change country by country' in the chart, you can confirm that the two points also apply to other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.