Why Are Women Living Longer Than Men?

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. What's the main reason women are more likely to live longer than men? Why does this benefit increase as time passes? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to support an unambiguous conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer lives than men, however, we do not know what the contribution of each of these factors is.

We are aware that women live longer than men, regardless of their weight. However, this is not due to the fact that certain non-biological factors have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are other issues that are more intricate. For كيفية إقامة علاقة بالصور 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 line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl from every country could expect to live longer than her younger brother.

It is interesting to note that, while the advantage for women is present everywhere, country-specific differences are huge. In Russia, women live 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the difference is less that half a year.

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In rich countries the advantage of women in longevity was not as great.
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The next chart compares male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both men as well as women in the US are living much, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, the gap is widening: While the advantage of women in life expectancy was once very small, it has increased substantially with time.

When you click on the option "Change country from the chart, check that these two points also apply to the other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.