Why 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 has this advantage increased over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence is not sufficient to draw an absolute conclusion. While we are aware that there are biological, behavioral and environmental variables that play an integral role in the longevity of women over men, we don't know how much each one contributes.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that a large portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men in the present however not as previously, has to do with the fact that some fundamental non-biological factors have changed. These factors are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are other issues 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, 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, اضيق وضعية للجماع all countries are above the diagonal parity line ; it means that in all nations the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a new boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that while 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 less that half a year.

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In countries with high incomes, the longevity advantage for women used to be smaller
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart plots male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two things stand out.

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

And second, there is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be quite small but it increased substantially over the course of the last century.

If you select the option "Change country' on the chart, you can determine if these two points are also applicable to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.