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 makes women live longer than men, and why have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? We only have a few clues and the evidence is not sufficient to support an absolute conclusion. While we are aware that there are behavioral, biological and environmental factors which play a significant role in women living longer than men, we do not know the extent to which each factor plays a role.

We have learned that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. However it is not because of certain non-biological aspects have changed. The factors changing are numerous. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others are more complex. 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, ابر التخسيس 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 line of parity - which means that in every country that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a newborn boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that, while the advantage for women exists across all countries, the country-specific differences are huge. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the difference is less than half an hour.

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The advantage of women in life expectancy was much lower in rich countries than it is now.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart compares male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two points stand out.

First, there's an upward trend. Both men and women in the US live a lot, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very modest however, it has increased significantly over the last century.

You can verify that the points you've listed are applicable to other countries that have data by selecting the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.