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 so longer than men in the present and why does this benefit increase over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn’t sufficient to support an unambiguous conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women are healthier than men; but we don’t know exactly how strong the relative contribution of each one of these factors is.
We know that women live longer than men, regardless of weight. But this isn’t because of certain non-biological aspects have changed. What are these new factors? 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 اوضاع الجماع 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 all countries are above the diagonal parity line – this means that in all countries that a baby girl can be expected 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 can be significant. In Russia women have a longer life span than men; in Bhutan the gap is just half a year.
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In rich countries the advantage of women in longevity was previously smaller.
Let’s look at how female longevity advantage has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the men and women’s life expectancies when they were born in the US between 1790 until 2014. Two specific points stand out.
The first is that there is an upward trend. Women and men 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.
And second, اوضاع الجماع there is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in life expectancy used to be very small but it increased substantially in the past century.
You can confirm that these principles are also applicable to other countries that have data by selecting the “Change country” option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.