Why Do Women Have Longer Lives 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 reason women are more likely to live longer than men? What is the reason the advantage has grown in the past? We only have a few clues and the evidence is not strong enough to make an informed conclusion. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we aren't sure how significant the impact of each of these factors is.

In spite of the weight, we know that at least part of the reason why women live longer than men today however not as in the past, is to be due to the fact that some key non-biological factors have changed. What are these changing 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. As we can see, all countries are above the diagonal line of parity - it means that in all nations that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a new boy.1

Interestingly, this chart shows that while the female advantage exists everywhere, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than males. In Bhutan the gap is just half a year.

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In wealthy countries, the longevity advantage for women used to be smaller
We will now examine how the female advantage in terms of longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows the gender-based and female-specific life expectancy when they were born in the US between 1790-2014. Two specific points stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both genders in the United States live longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an increasing gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used to be extremely small but it increased substantially in the past century.

It is possible to verify that these points are also applicable to other countries with information by clicking on the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور Sweden.