Why Do Women Live Longer Than Men

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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 are more likely to live longer than men? Why is this difference growing over time? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to reach an unambiguous conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, زيوت تطويل الشعر we aren't sure how strong the relative contribution of each of these factors is.

Independently of the exact amount of weight, we are aware that a large portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men today and not in the past, has to do with the fact that some key 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. 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. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl in every country can be expected to live for longer than her older brother.

The chart above 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 there is a difference of less than half a calendar year.

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In countries with high incomes, the female advantage in longevity was not as great.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two specific points stand out.

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

And second, زيوت تطويل الشعر there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used be quite small but it increased substantially over the last century.

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