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 reason women are more likely to live longer than men? Why has this advantage gotten larger as time passes? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence isn’t sufficient to reach an absolute conclusion. We recognize that biological, behavioral and environmental factors contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; however, we aren’t sure how strong the relative contribution of each factor is.
In spite of how much amount, we can say that a large portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men in the present but not in the past, has to have to do with the fact that certain key non-biological factors 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, so advances in medicine that reduced the long-term health burden from infectious diseases, especially for survivors, Sustainabilipedia.org/index.php/Why_Women_Live_Longer_Than_Men 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 you can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line , which means that in every country a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1
The chart below shows that while there is a female advantage everywhere, cross-country differences could be significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men; in Bhutan the gap is just half an hour.
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In wealthy countries, the female advantage in longevity was smaller
Let’s see how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart compares the male and female lifespans at birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two areas stand out.
There is an upward trend. Men and women in the United States live longer than they used to 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.
Second, there’s an ever-widening gap: female advantage in life expectancy used be very small, but it grew substantially in the past century.
By selecting ‘Change Country from the chart, confirm that the two points apply to other countries with available information: Sweden, France and the UK.
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