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's the reason why women have a longer life span than men? Why the advantage has grown as time passes? The evidence is limited and we're left with only some solutions. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, However, we're not sure what the contribution of each factor is.

It is known that women are living longer than men, regardless of weight. However this isn't due to the fact that certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. These 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. We can see that all countries are over the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl in every country can expect to live longer than her younger brother.

This chart illustrates that, although there is a women's advantage everywhere, cross-country differences could be significant. In Russia women are 10 years older than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half each year.

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The advantage for women in terms of life expectancy was lower in the richer countries as compared to the present.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows the gender-based and كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام female-specific life expectancy when they were born in the US between 1790 to 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

There is an upward trend. and women in the US live much, much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used to be very small but it increased substantially over the course of the last century.

It is possible to verify that these principles are also applicable to other countries with data by selecting the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.