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's the main reason women have a longer life span than men? Why does this benefit increase in the past? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence is not strong enough to make a definitive conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and العاب زوجية environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; but we don't know exactly how strong the relative contribution of each of these factors is.

In spite of how much amount of weight, we are aware that at least a portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men in the present but not previously, is to do with the fact that some key 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. Others 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. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal parity line , العاب زوجية this means that in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

The chart above shows that although the female advantage is present everywhere, country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the difference is just half each year.

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In countries with high incomes, the female advantage in longevity used to be smaller
Let's now look at the way that female advantages in terms of longevity has changed over time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancies when they were born 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 live much, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, the gap is growing: Although the advantage of women in life expectancy was once tiny, it has increased substantially over time.

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