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 live longer than men? And why does this benefit increase in the past? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn’t sufficient to support an unambiguous conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; however, we do not know how much the influence of each factor is.
We are aware that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. But this isn’t 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. There are other issues that are more intricate. 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 ; it means that in all nations the newborn girl is likely to live for longer than a new boy.1
This graph shows that although there is a women’s advantage throughout the world, the differences between countries can be significant. In Russia women are 10 years older than men; in Bhutan the gap is just half one year.
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The advantage for women in life expectancy was less in the richer countries than it is now.
Let’s take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The following chart shows the male and female lifespans at birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two areas stand out.
First, there’s an upward trend. Both men and women in the US live 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 terms of life expectancy used to be very modest but it increased substantially over the last century.
You can confirm that these are applicable to other countries with data by clicking the “Change country” option on the chart. This includes the UK, ابر التخسيس France, and Sweden.
