Why Women Are More Likely To 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 is the reason women live more than men do today and how have these advantages gotten bigger in the past? There isn't much evidence and we have only limited solutions. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, but we don't know exactly how significant the impact of each of these factors is.

We know that women are living longer than males, regardless of weight. But, this is not due to the fact that certain non-biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Other are more complicated. 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, اوضاع الجماع 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. It is clear that every country is over the diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl in all countries can be expected to live for longer than her younger brother.

The chart below shows that while there is a female advantage in all countries, the differences across countries can be significant. In Russia women are 10 years older than men, while in Bhutan the difference is just half each year.

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In the richer countries, the advantage of women in longevity was smaller
Let's examine how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart compares the male and female lifespans when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both men and women in the US have a much longer life span longer than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is an increase in the gap between men and women: اوضاع الجماع female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very modest but it increased substantially in the past century.

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