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 over time? We only have partial evidence and the evidence is not strong enough to make an unambiguous conclusion. We know that behavioral, زيوت تطويل الشعر biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; however, we aren't sure how significant the impact of each factor is.

Independently of the exact amount, we can say that a large portion of the reason why women live longer than men today however not as in the past, has to have to do with the fact that certain important non-biological aspects have changed. These factors are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Certain 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 we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line , this means that in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

This graph shows that while there is a female advantage in all countries, the differences across countries are often significant. In Russia women have a longer life span than men. In Bhutan the difference is less than half each year.

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The female advantage in life expectancy was less in rich countries than it is today.
Let's look at the way that female advantages in longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the life expectancy of males and females when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two areas stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both men as well as 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.

And second, there is a widening gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be extremely small but it increased substantially in the past century.

When you click on the option "Change country' on the chart, you are able to verify that these two points are also applicable to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.