Why 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 makes women live more than men do today, and why does this benefit increase in the past? The evidence isn't conclusive and we're left with only limited solutions. While we are aware that there are biological, behavioral, and environmental factors that play an integral role in the longevity of women over men, we don't know the extent to which each factor plays a role.

It is known that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. But it is not because of 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. 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. It is clear that every country is over the diagonal line of parity. This means that a newborn girl in every country can be expected to live for longer than her brother.

This chart is interesting in that it shows that, while the advantage for women exists across all countries, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women are 10 years older than men, كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور while in Bhutan the gap is less than half a year.

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In countries with high incomes, the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two points stand out.

There is an upward trend. and 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.

Second, there's an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be very small, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country in the chart, you can determine if these two points are applicable to the other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.