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 why the advantage has grown as time passes? The evidence is limited and we have only incomplete answers. While we are aware that there are behavioral, biological and environmental variables that all play a role in women who live longer than men, we do not know how much each one contributes.

We are aware that women are living longer than males, regardless of weight. But this isn't due to the fact that certain non-biological aspects have changed. These are the factors that are changing. 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, ابر التخسيس 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. As we can see, every country is above the diagonal line of parity - this means in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

The chart above shows that while the female advantage exists in all countries, global differences are significant. In Russia women are 10 years older than men, while in Bhutan the gap is less than half each year.

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In the richer countries, the advantage of women in longevity was not as great.
We will now examine the way that female advantages in life expectancy has changed over time. The chart below shows gender-based and female-specific life expectancy when they were born in the US during the period 1790-2014. Two things stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both men and women in the US are living much, much longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be extremely small, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.

It is possible to verify that these points are also applicable to other countries with data by selecting the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, ابر التخسيس France, and Sweden.