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. Why do women live so longer than men in the present, and why does this benefit increase over time? The evidence isn't conclusive and we have only some answers. Although we know that there are behavioral, biological and environmental factors that play an integral role in women living longer than males, we aren't sure how much each factor contributes.

We know that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. But this is not because of certain non-biological aspects 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 all countries are over the diagonal line of parity. This means that a newborn girl in every country can be expected to live for longer than her older brother.

This chart shows that, اضيق وضعية للجماع although there is a women's advantage in all countries, the differences across countries are often significant. In Russia, women live 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half a calendar year.

__S.17__
__S.19__
The advantage women had in terms of life expectancy was lower in rich countries that it is today.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart plots the life expectancy of males and females when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two areas stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Both genders in America live longer than they were 100 years 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 terms of life expectancy used be very small but it increased substantially during the last century.

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