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. Why do women live more than men do today and how has this advantage increased over time? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn't strong enough to make an absolute conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women are healthier than men; but we don't know exactly how strong the relative contribution of each one of these factors is.

In spite of the amount, تحاميل مهبلية; you could check here, we can say that at a minimum, the reason why women live so much longer than men do today however not as in the past, is to do with 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. Some are more complex. 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 line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl from any country can expect to live longer than her brother.

This chart is interesting in that it shows that the advantage of women exists everywhere, the country-specific differences are huge. In Russia, women live 10 years more than males. In Bhutan, the difference is less that half a year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in countries with higher incomes as compared to the present.
We will now examine the way that female advantages in terms of longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy at birth in the US during the period 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women in America have longer lives than they did 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 terms of life expectancy was very small, it has increased substantially with time.

You can verify that these are applicable to other countries that have data by clicking the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.