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 women are more likely to live longer than men? What is the reason the advantage has grown as time passes? The evidence is sketchy and we have only limited answers. Although we know that there are behavioral, biological and environmental factors which all play a part in women who live longer than males, we aren’t sure how much each one contributes.

It is known that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. But this is not because of certain non-biological aspects have changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Some are more complex. 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. As you can see, all countries are above the diagonal line of parity – it means that in all nations the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This graph shows that although there is a women’s advantage everywhere, cross-country differences can be significant. In Russia women have a longer life span than males; while in Bhutan the gap is less than half a year.

__S.17__

__S.19__

The advantage of women in terms of life expectancy was lower in the richer countries that it is today.

We will now examine how the gender advantage in terms of longevity has changed over time. The next chart plots the male and female lifespans at birth in the US over the period 1790-2014. Two aspects stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Both men as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer than they did 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is a widening gap: Glorynote.com/%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a7%d8%a8%d8%b1%d8%a7%d8%ac/ The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be very small, but it grew substantially in the past century.

You can verify that these are applicable to other countries that have data by clicking the «Change country» option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.