Why Are Women Living 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. Why do women live so more than men do today, and why have these advantages gotten bigger over time? There isn't much evidence and we have only limited solutions. We know there are behavioral, biological and environmental variables that play an integral role in women living longer than men, we don't know what percentage each factor plays in.

It is known that women are living longer than males, regardless of weight. However this isn't due to the fact that certain non-biological factors have changed. These variables are evolving. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Other 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 over the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl in every country can anticipate to live longer than her younger brother.

This chart shows that, although women have an advantage everywhere, cross-country differences can be significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men; in Bhutan the difference is just half a year.

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In rich countries the advantage of women in longevity was smaller
We will now examine how the advantage of women in longevity has changed with time. The following chart shows the men and women's life expectancies at the time of birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two specific points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Both 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, there's an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very small however it increased dramatically during the last century.

By selecting 'Change Country by country' in the chart, افضل كريم للشعر you are able to confirm that the two points are applicable to other countries with available information: Sweden, France and افضل كريم للشعر the UK.