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's the reason why women have a longer life span than men? What is the reason does this benefit increase as time passes? The evidence is sketchy and we only have incomplete answers. We know there are behavioral, biological as well as environmental factors that all play a role in women living longer than men, we do not know how much each one contributes.

It is known that women are living longer than males, اوضاع الجماع regardless of weight. But this isn't because of certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. These factors 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, 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 parity line ; which means that in every country the newborn girl is likely to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

The chart above shows that the advantage of women is present everywhere, country-specific differences are huge. In Russia, women live 10 years more than men. In Bhutan, the difference is less than half a calendar year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in the richer countries that it is today.
Let's now look at how the advantage of women in terms of longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two things stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Women and men 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.

Second, there's an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used be very small but it increased substantially during the last century.

When you click on the option "Change country in the chart, you are able to verify that these two points also apply to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.