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 have a longer life span than men? And why the advantage has grown as time passes? We have only a small amount of evidence and the evidence is not sufficient to reach an informed conclusion. We know that behavioral, biological and environmental factors play a role in the fact that women live longer than men; however, we do not know what the contribution of each one of these factors is.

In spite of how much amount, we can say that at least a portion of the reason why women live so much longer than men, but not previously, has to have to do with the fact that a number of key non-biological factors have changed. The factors changing are numerous. Some are well known and كيفية ممارسة العلاقة الزوجية فى الاسلام 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 diagonal line of parity - this means in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live for longer than a newborn boy.1

It is interesting to note that, while the advantage for women exists across all countries, the cross-country differences are large. In Russia women are 10 years older than men, while in Bhutan the gap is less than half each year.

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In countries with high incomes, the advantage of women in longevity was not as great.
Let's look at how the female advantage in longevity has changed with time. The following chart shows the male and female life expectancy at birth in the US from 1790 to 2014. Two distinct points stand out.

There is an upward trend. Women and men in the United States live longer 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 increase in the gap between men and women: female advantage in life expectancy used to be very small however it increased dramatically during the last century.

You can confirm that these are applicable to other countries that have data by clicking the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, France, and Sweden.