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 makes women live longer than men, and صبغ الشعر بالاسود – over here – why does this benefit increase over time? There is only limited evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to support an absolute 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 to each of these variables is.
We know that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. But this is not because of certain non-biological aspects have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Other are more complicated. 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 line of parity – this means in all countries the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a newborn boy.1
It is interesting to note that while the female advantage exists everywhere, the global differences are significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men; in Bhutan the difference is less than half an hour.
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In wealthy countries, the advantage of women in longevity was smaller
Let’s take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart plots the life expectancy of males and females at birth in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two distinct features stand out.
The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women living in America are living longer than they were 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
Second, there’s an increasing gap: The female advantage in life expectancy used to be very small however, it has increased significantly over the course of the last century.
It is possible to verify that these principles are also applicable to other countries with data by selecting the “Change country” option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.
