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 live longer than men? And how the advantage has grown in the past? We only have partial evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to draw a definitive conclusion. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women have longer life spans than men, However, we're not sure what the contribution of each one of these factors is.

We have learned that women are living longer than men, regardless of weight. But this is not because of certain 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. Others 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 diagonal line of parity. This implies that a baby girl in all countries can anticipate to live longer than her brother.

It is interesting to note that, while the advantage for women exists everywhere, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women have an average of 10 years more than men, while in Bhutan the difference is just half a year.

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In the richer countries, the advantage of women in longevity was not as great.
We will now examine how the female advantage in longevity has changed with time. The chart below illustrates the men and women's life expectancies at the birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Women and men in America have longer lives than they used to a century ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

And second, there is an ever-widening gap: تحاميل مهبلية female advantage in terms of life expectancy used to be very modest, but it grew substantially during the last century.

You can verify that these points are also applicable to other countries that have data by selecting the "Change country" option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.