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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 is this difference growing over time? The evidence isn't conclusive and we only have incomplete solutions. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors all play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; However, we're not sure what the contribution of each of these factors is.

In spite of how much amount, we can say that at a minimum, the reason women live so much longer than men today but not in the past, has to relate to the fact that some important non-biological aspects have changed. What are these factors that have changed? 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 all countries are above the diagonal line of parity - which means that in every country the newborn girl is likely to live longer than a new boy.1

The chart above shows that, while the advantage for women is present everywhere, cross-country differences are large. In Russia, women live for 10 years longer than men. In Bhutan, the difference is less than half a calendar year.

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The advantage for women in terms of life expectancy was lower in developed countries than it is now.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The chart below illustrates the male and female life expectancy when they were born in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two areas stand Glorynote.com/%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%AE%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%B3/ out.

First, there is an upward trend. Women and men in the United States live longer than they used to a century 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 be extremely small, but it grew substantially over the course of the last century.

By selecting 'Change Country by country' in the chart, you are able to confirm that the two points are applicable to other countries with available data: Sweden, France and the UK.