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 are more likely to live longer than men? And how has this advantage gotten larger over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence is not sufficient to support an unambiguous conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; However, we're not sure how significant the impact of each one of these factors is.

In spite of the amount, we can say that a large portion of the reason women live so much longer than men in the present but not in the past, has to relate to the fact that certain fundamental non-biological factors have changed. What are these new factors? 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, صبغ الشعر بالاسود 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 - this means in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a new boy.1

This graph shows that although women have an advantage across all countries, differences between countries could be significant. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the difference is less than half a calendar year.

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The advantage for women in life expectancy was less in developed countries than it is today.
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below shows gender-based and female-specific life expectancy when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Women and men in America have longer lives than they were a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The gap is getting wider: Although the advantage of women in life expectancy was quite small however, it has grown significantly over time.

You can confirm 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 صبغ الشعر بالاسود (you can try glorynote.com) Sweden.