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 women have a longer life span than men? Why has this advantage gotten larger in the past? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to support an absolute conclusion. We know 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 factor is.

Independently of the exact number of pounds, we know that at least part of the reason why women live longer than men, but not in the past, has to be due to the fact that certain significant non-biological elements have changed. What are these new 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. We can see that every country is over the line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl from every country could anticipate to live longer than her younger brother.

This chart shows that, although there is a women's advantage in all countries, the differences across countries can be significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men, while in Bhutan the gap is less than half one year.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was smaller in the richer countries than it is now.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart shows male and female life expectancies at birth in the US between 1790 and ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women in America have longer lives than they used to 100 years 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 very small but it increased substantially over the course of the last century.

By selecting 'Change Country by country' in the chart, you can check that these two points also apply to other countries with available data: Sweden, ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور France and the UK.