Why Do Women Have Longer Lives 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's the reason women have a longer life span than men? And why has this advantage gotten larger in the past? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn't strong enough to make an unambiguous conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; however, we do not know how strong the relative contribution of each of these factors is.

We are aware that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. But, this is not because of certain 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. Others 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. We can see that every country is above the line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl in every country can anticipate to live longer than her younger brother.

This chart illustrates that, even though women enjoy an advantage throughout the world, كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور the differences between countries could be significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan, the difference is less that half a year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was much lower in countries with higher incomes than it is now.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The chart below shows gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at the time of birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two specific points stand out.

The first is that there is 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, there's an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be very modest but it increased substantially in the past century.

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