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. What's the main reason women live longer than men? And how the advantage has grown as time passes? The evidence isn't conclusive and we're only able to provide some solutions. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women have longer lives than men, However, we're not sure how much the influence to each of these variables is.

We know that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. But, this is not because of certain biological factors have changed. These are the factors that are changing. 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 every country is above the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl in every country can expect to live longer than her older brother.

The chart below shows that although there is a women's advantage throughout the world, the differences between countries can be substantial. In Russia women have a longer life span than males; while in Bhutan the difference is less than half one year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
In wealthy countries, اضيق وضعية للجماع the female advantage in longevity was previously smaller.
Let's 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 the birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both genders living in America are living longer 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 a widening gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used be very small but it increased substantially during the last century.

If you select the option "Change country by country' in the chart, you can check that these two points apply to the other countries having available data: Sweden, France and the UK.