Why do women live longer than men?
An automated translation of this article into Spanish is available here: ourworldindata.org/por-que-las-mujeres-viven-mas-que-los-hombres
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. Why do women live so much longer than men today, and why has this advantage increased over time? The evidence is limited and we only have partial answers. We know that biological, behavioral and environmental factors all contribute to the fact that women live longer than men; but we don’t know exactly how strong the relative contribution of each of these factors is.
Independently of the exact weight, we know that at least part of the reason why women live so much longer than men today, but not in the past, has to do with the fact that some key non-biological factors have changed. What are these changing factors? 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.
The first chart below shows life expectancy at birth for men and women. As we can see, all countries are above the diagonal parity line – this means in all countries a newborn girl can expect to live longer than a newborn boy.1
