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 have these advantages gotten bigger over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn’t sufficient to draw a definitive conclusion. We know there are biological, behavioral as well as environmental factors which all play a part in the longevity of women over men, we do not know how much each factor contributes.
Independently of the exact weight, we know that at least part of the reason women live so much longer than men do today but not in the past, is to have to do with the fact that several significant non-biological elements have changed. These are the factors that are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, تخفيض ترتيب اليكسا 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 we can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line , which means that in every country that a baby girl can be expected to live for longer than a new boy.1
The chart below shows that even though women enjoy an advantage across all countries, differences between countries can be substantial. In Russia, women live 10 years more than males. In Bhutan, the difference is less that half a year.
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The female advantage in terms of life expectancy was lower in the richer countries than it is today.
Let’s see how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The chart below shows men and women’s life expectancies at the birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.
There is an upward trend. as well as women in the US live a lot, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
The second is that there is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be extremely small, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.
If you select the option «Change country in the chart, you are able to check that these two points are also applicable to other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.