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 have a longer life span than men? And why has this advantage gotten larger in the past? There is only limited evidence and the evidence isn’t sufficient to draw an informed conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer life spans than men, however, we aren’t sure what the contribution of each of these factors is.

In spite of how much amount, we can say that at least part of the reason why women live longer than men in the present but not in the past, is to have to do with the fact that a number of 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. Other are more complicated. For Glorynote.com (Read the Full Article) 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. It is clear that every country is over the line of parity diagonally. This means that a newborn girl from every country could expect to live longer than her brother.

Interestingly, this chart shows that, while the advantage for women exists across all countries, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the gap is less than half each year.

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The advantage women had in terms of life expectancy was lower in countries with higher incomes as compared to the present.

Let’s now look at how the female advantage in life expectancy has changed over time. The chart below shows men and women’s life expectancies at birth in the US in the years 1790 to 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

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

Second, there’s an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used to be quite small, but it grew substantially in the past century.

Using the option ‘Change country’ on the chart, you can verify that these two points apply to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.