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 so longer than men and why has this advantage increased over time? There isn't much evidence and we only have partial solutions. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; but we don't know exactly how much the influence of each one of these factors is.

It is known that women live longer than males, regardless of weight. However, this is not because of certain biological or 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. Some are more complex. 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 ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور women. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal parity line , this means that in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart below shows that while there is a female advantage in all countries, the differences across countries are often significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men, while in Bhutan the difference is just half each year.

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In the richer countries, the longevity advantage for women was smaller
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below illustrates the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the time of birth in the US in the years 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both genders in America have longer lives than they used to a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is a widening gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be quite small however it increased dramatically during the last century.

It is possible to verify that the points you've listed are applicable to other countries that have data by clicking on the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.