Why 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 much longer than men today, and why have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? We only have partial evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to draw an unambiguous conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and تحاميل مهبلية environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, تحاميل مهبلية however, we do not know how significant the impact of each one of these factors is.

In spite of the number of pounds, we know that at least a portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men today and not previously, is to relate to the fact that a number of 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. There are others 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. It is clear that every country is over the line of parity diagonally. This means that a newborn girl in every country can anticipate to live longer than her brothers.

This chart shows that, even though women enjoy an advantage everywhere, cross-country differences can be significant. In Russia women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan, the difference is less than half a calendar year.

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In the richer countries, the advantage of women in longevity was previously smaller.
Let's now look at how the advantage of women in longevity has changed with time. The chart below illustrates the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at birth in the US during the period 1790 until 2014. Two areas stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Men and women in America have longer lives than they used to a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used to be very modest but it increased substantially over the course of the last century.

If you select the option "Change country in the chart, you can confirm that the two points are applicable to other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.