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 main reason women have a longer life span than men? And why has this advantage gotten larger in the past? The evidence is limited and we’re only able to provide partial answers. We recognize that biological, behavioral and موقع تزويد مشتركين environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women have longer lives than men, but we don’t know exactly how significant the impact of each one of these factors is.
It is known that women live longer than males, regardless of weight. However this is not due to the fact that certain non-biological factors have changed. What are these new 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. We can see that all countries are above the diagonal parity line – this means in all countries baby girls can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1
This chart shows that, although there is a women’s advantage in all countries, the differences across countries are often significant. In Russia, women live 10 years more than men. In Bhutan there is a difference of less that half a year.
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In wealthy countries, the women’s advantage in longevity was previously smaller.
Let’s look at the way that female advantages in longevity has changed with time. The next chart compares the male and female lifespans when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two areas stand out.
First, there’s an upward trend: Men as well as women in the US are living much, much longer today than a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
Second, there’s an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in life expectancy used be quite small, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.
When you click on the option “Change country by country’ in the chart, you can verify that these two points are applicable to other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.