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 is the reason women live much longer than men today and why have these advantages gotten bigger over time? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to draw an unambiguous conclusion. We know there are behavioral, biological, and environmental factors that all play a role in women who live longer than males, it isn't clear how much each factor contributes.

In spite of the amount of weight, we are aware that at a minimum, the reason why women live so much longer than men in the present however not as in the past, is to have to do with the fact that several significant non-biological elements 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 complex. 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 parity line - which means that in every country baby girls can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

This chart is interesting in that it shows that while the female advantage exists in all countries, cross-country differences are large. In Russia women live 10 years longer than men, while in Bhutan the gap is just half one year.

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In wealthy countries, the longevity advantage for women was smaller
We will now examine the way that female advantages in longevity has changed with time. The chart below shows male and female life expectancy at the birth in the US in the years 1790-2014. Two areas stand out.

The first is that there is an upward trend. Men and women in the US have a much longer life span longer than they did 100 years 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 extremely small however it increased dramatically during the last century.

You can confirm that these points are also applicable to other countries that have information by clicking on the "Change country" option in the chart. This includes the UK, ماذا يحدث بين الزوجين في الحمام بالصور France, and Sweden.