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. Why do women live more than men do today and why have these advantages gotten bigger over time? The evidence is sketchy and we're only able to provide some answers. Although we know that there are behavioral, biological and environmental variables which play a significant role in women living longer than males, we aren't sure how much each one contributes.

We know that women are living longer than males, regardless of weight. However this is not because of certain biological factors have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Other are more complicated. For example, كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام 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 every country is above the line of parity diagonally. This means that a newborn girl in all countries can expect to live longer than her younger brother.

The chart below shows that even though women enjoy an advantage across all countries, differences between countries are often significant. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is only half a year.

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In the richer countries, the women's advantage in longevity was smaller
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart plots the life expectancy of males and females when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two specific points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women in America have longer lives than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's a widening gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be extremely small but it increased substantially over the course of the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country from the chart, you are able to verify that these two points are applicable to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.