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 more than men do today and why has this advantage increased over time? We only have a few clues and the evidence isn't sufficient to draw an unambiguous conclusion. While we are aware that there are behavioral, biological, and environmental factors that all play a role in women who live longer than men, we don't know the extent to which each factor plays a role.

We have learned that women are living longer than men, regardless of their weight. But this is not due to the fact that certain non-biological aspects have changed. These factors are changing. Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. There are others 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 ; this means in all countries that a baby girl can be expected to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart illustrates that, although there is a women's advantage throughout the world, the differences between countries can be significant. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men. In Bhutan the difference is just half an hour.

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The advantage women had in life expectancy was less in the richer countries as compared to the present.
We will now examine how the female advantage in terms of longevity has changed over time. The following chart shows male and female life expectancies when they were born in the US during the time period between 1790 and 2014. Two things stand out.

There is an upward trend. Men and كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام - click to find out more, 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.

And second, there is an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be quite small however, it has increased significantly in the past century.

When you click on the option "Change country in the chart, you are able to confirm that the two points apply to other countries that have available data: Sweden, France and the UK.