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 longer than men, and why have these advantages gotten bigger over time? We only have partial evidence and the evidence isn't sufficient to draw an informed conclusion. While we are aware that there are biological, behavioral and environmental factors that all play a role in women's longevity more than men, we do not know how much each one contributes.

Independently of the exact amount of weight, we are aware that at a minimum, the reason why women live so much longer than men and not previously, is to have to do with the fact that a number of fundamental non-biological factors have changed. What are these new factors? Some are well known and relatively straightforward, like the fact that men smoke more often. Some 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. As you can see, every country is above the diagonal parity line , please click Glorynote (http://uriduri.charmsul.com/) which means that in every country baby girls can expect to live longer than a new boy.1

The chart below shows that even though women enjoy an advantage in all countries, the differences across countries could be significant. In Russia women have a longer life span than men, while in Bhutan the gap is less than half each year.

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The female advantage in life expectancy was less in the richer countries than it is today.
Let's take a look at how the female longevity advantage has changed over time. The next chart plots the life expectancy of males and females when they were born in the US between 1790 and 2014. Two points stand out.

First, there is an upward trend. Men and women 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.

There is an ever-widening gap: female advantage in terms of life expectancy used be very modest, but it grew substantially over 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.