Why Do 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. What is the reason women are more likely to live longer than men? And how the advantage has grown as time passes? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't strong enough to make an absolute conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; however, we aren't sure how much the influence of each one of these factors is.

We have learned that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. However this isn't because of certain non-biological factors have changed. What are these changing factors? 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 العاب زوجية women. We can see that every country is above the diagonal parity line ; this means in all countries that a baby girl can be expected to live for longer than a new boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that, while the advantage for women is present everywhere, country-specific differences are huge. In Russia, women live 10 years more than males. In Bhutan the difference is less than half a calendar year.

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In rich countries the advantage of women in longevity was not as great.
Let's look at how the female advantage in longevity has changed over time. The next chart compares the life expectancy of males and females at birth in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

There is an upward trend. Men as well as women in the US have a much longer life span longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be extremely small however, it has increased significantly over the last century.

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