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 much longer than men today and why have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't strong enough to make an unambiguous conclusion. Although we know that there are biological, behavioral and environmental variables that play an integral role in women living longer than males, we aren't sure how much each one contributes.

In spite of how much number of pounds, we know that a large portion of the reason women live longer than men in the present and not in the past, is to have to do with the fact that certain key 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. Other 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. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal parity line - this means in all countries baby girls can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart above shows that although the female advantage is present everywhere, global differences are significant. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan, the difference is only half a year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in countries with higher incomes that it is today.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the men and women's life expectancies when they were born in the US during the period 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.

First, there's an upward trend. Men and women in the US live a lot, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, the gap is getting wider: Although the female advantage in life expectancy was once very small but it has risen significantly in the past.

You can check if these are applicable to other countries that have data by clicking the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, تحاميل مهبلية and Sweden.