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? There is only limited evidence and the evidence isn’t strong enough to make a definitive conclusion. We know there are biological, psychological, and environmental factors that play an integral role in women who live longer than men, we don’t know how much each factor contributes.

We have learned that women are living longer than males, regardless of weight. However this isn’t because of certain biological or non-biological factors have changed. What are these changing factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, علامات الحمل بولد 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. As you can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line , it means that in all nations baby girls can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1

This chart illustrates that, even though women enjoy an advantage everywhere, cross-country differences could be significant. In Russia women live 10 years longer than males; while in Bhutan the gap is less than half an hour.

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In the richer countries, the women’s advantage in longevity used to be smaller

Let’s look at how the female advantage in longevity has changed with time. The following chart shows the male and female life expectancies at the time of birth in the US between 1790 to 2014. Two distinct features stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Both genders living in America are living longer than they were 100 years ago. This is in line with historical increases in life expectancy everywhere in the world.

Second, there’s an increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in life expectancy used to be extremely small however, it has increased significantly over the course of the last century.

It is possible to verify that the points you’ve listed are applicable to other countries that have data by clicking the “Change country” option on the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.