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. What makes women live more than men do today and why have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? The evidence isn't conclusive and we only have limited solutions. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; However, we're not sure how strong the relative contribution of each of these factors is.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that a large portion of the reason women live so much longer than men, but not in the past, has to be due to the fact that a number of fundamental non-biological factors have changed. These are the factors that are changing. Some are well known and العاب زوجية relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Certain 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 you can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line ; this means that in all countries baby girls can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This graph shows that while there is a female advantage in all countries, the differences across countries can be significant. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan there is a difference of only half a year.

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In the richer countries, the female advantage in longevity was smaller
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US between 1790-2014. Two distinct points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Men as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The gap is getting wider: Although the female advantage in life expectancy was once quite small however, it has grown significantly over time.

By selecting 'Change Country by country' in the chart, verify that these two points are applicable to other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.