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? What is the reason the advantage has grown over time? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence is not strong enough to make an unambiguous conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; however, we do not know how strong the relative contribution to each of these variables is.

Independently of the exact amount of weight, we are aware that at least part of the reason women live so much longer than men do today but not in the past, is to relate to the fact that several important non-biological aspects have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Other 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, every country is above the diagonal line of parity - it means that in all nations baby girls can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that although the female advantage exists in all countries, country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women live for 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 less in developed countries than it is now.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart plots the male and female lifespans when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two areas stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Men and women in the United States live longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is an increasing gap: علامات الحمل بولد The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be very small but it increased substantially over the last century.

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