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. What is the reason women have a longer life span than men? Why does this benefit increase over time? The evidence is sketchy and we're left with only some answers. While we are aware that there are behavioral, biological, and environmental factors that play an integral role in women who live longer than men, we don't know what percentage each factor plays in.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that at least a portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men today and not in the past, is to be due to the fact that some significant non-biological elements have changed. These factors are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور 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, ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور 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 line of parity - this means that in all countries baby girls can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

This graph shows that although there is a women's advantage across all countries, differences between countries are often significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the difference is less than half one year.

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In wealthy countries, the advantage of women in longevity was smaller
Let's now look at the way that female advantages in life expectancy has changed over time. The following chart shows the male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both men and women in the US have a much longer life span longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in life expectancy used be very small but it increased substantially during the last century.

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