Why do women have longer lives 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? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence is not strong enough to make an absolute conclusion. We know there are biological, behavioral and environmental variables which play a significant role in women who live longer than men, we don't know how much each one contributes.

Independently of the exact weight, we know that at least part of the reason women live longer than men however not as previously, has to be due to the fact that certain key non-biological factors have changed. What are these factors that have changed? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Others 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, 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 new boy.1

This graph shows that although women have an advantage throughout the world, the differences between countries could be significant. In Russia women have a longer life span than men; in Bhutan the difference is less than half an hour.

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The female advantage in life expectancy was less in the richer countries than it is now.
Let's see how the female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The following chart shows male and female life expectancy at birth in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

First, ابر التخسيس 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.

And second, there is a widening gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used to be extremely small, but it grew substantially during the last century.

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