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 in the present and why have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to support a definitive conclusion. While we are aware that there are biological, behavioral, and environmental factors which all play a part in women who live longer than males, it isn't clear how much each factor contributes.

In spite of how much weight, we know that a large portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men today and not previously, is to have to do with the fact that some key non-biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? 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 women. As we can see, علامات الحمل بولد all countries are above the diagonal parity line , it means that in all nations the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart shows that, even though women enjoy an advantage in all countries, the differences across countries could be significant. In Russia women are 10 years older than males; while in Bhutan the gap is less than half each year.

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In the richer countries, the women's advantage in longevity was not as great.
Let's look at how the gender advantage in terms of longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the birth in the US during the period 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both genders living in America are living longer than they were a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there's an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used to be very modest however, it has increased significantly in the past century.

You can verify that these 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.