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. Why do women live more than men do today, and why does this benefit increase over time? There is only limited evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to support an absolute conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; but we don't know exactly how much the influence of each of these factors is.

In spite of the amount, we can say that a large portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men in the present, but not in the past, has to relate to the fact that some 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. 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, افضل كريم للشعر 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. As we can see, افضل كريم للشعر (Glorynote`s recent blog post) 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 newborn boy.1

This chart illustrates that, although women have an advantage everywhere, cross-country differences are often significant. In Russia, women live 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is only half a year.

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In countries with high incomes, the female advantage in longevity used to be smaller
Let's look at how female longevity advantage has changed in the course of time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancy at the birth in the US between 1790 until 2014. Two points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Both genders in the United States live longer than they were a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

There is a widening gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used be very modest however it increased dramatically over the course of the last century.

If you select the option "Change country' on the chart, you will be able to determine if these two points are applicable to other countries that have available information: Sweden, France and the UK.