Why Women Are More Likely To 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 makes women live longer than men in the present and how does this benefit increase over time? There isn't much evidence and we have only some solutions. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer lives than men, but we don't know exactly what the contribution of each factor is.

In spite of the weight, we know that a large portion of the reason why women live longer than men and not previously, is to have to do with the fact that some fundamental non-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. There are other issues that are more intricate. 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. It is clear that all countries are above the diagonal line of parity. This means that a newborn girl from any country can expect to live longer than her younger brother.

The chart above shows that, while the advantage for women is present everywhere, cross-country differences are large. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the gap is just half a year.

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In countries with high incomes, the women's advantage in longevity was not as great.
Let's now look at the way that female advantages in longevity has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy when they were born in the US from 1790-2014. Two areas stand out.

First, اوضاع الجماع there is an upward trend. Both genders living in America are living longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is a widening gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be extremely small however it increased dramatically over the course of the last century.

It is possible to verify that these points are also applicable to other countries that have information by clicking on the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.