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 live much longer than men today, and why does this benefit increase over time? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn’t sufficient to support an absolute conclusion. While we are aware that there are biological, psychological and environmental factors that all play a role in the longevity of women over men, we don’t know the extent to which each factor plays a role.
In spite of the precise number of pounds, we know that at a minimum, the reason women live longer than men and not in the past, has to relate to the fact that some important non-biological aspects have changed. These are the factors that are changing. 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, كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام 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. We can see that every country is above the diagonal parity line ; this means in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1
The chart above shows that while the female advantage is present everywhere, cross-country differences are large. In Russia, women live 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan the difference is only half a year.
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The advantage for women in life expectancy was much lower in countries with higher incomes that it is today.
Let’s see how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart shows the male and female lifespans when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two points stand out.
First, there is an upward trend. Women and men in the United States live longer than they used to a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
There is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very modest but it increased substantially in the past century.
When you click on the option «Change country by country’ in the chart, check that these two points are applicable to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.