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. Why do women live so longer than men and why has this advantage increased over time? The evidence is sketchy and we're left with only incomplete answers. We are aware that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all 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 the precise weight, we know that a large portion of the reason women live longer than men today however not as in the past, has to be due to the fact that some fundamental non-biological factors have changed. What are the factors that are changing? 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. We can see that every country is above the line of parity diagonally. This implies that a baby girl from every country could be expected to live for http://glorynote.com/ longer than her older brother.

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 males. In Bhutan the difference is less that half a year.

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In the richer countries, the longevity advantage for women was not as great.
Let's now look at how the gender advantage in longevity has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the men and women's life expectancies at the birth in the US in the years 1790 to 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Both genders in America have longer lives than they did a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

The second is that there is an increasing gap: The female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be quite small, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.

It is possible to verify that these principles are also applicable to other countries with data by clicking on the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.