Why do women live longer than men?

In 2024, American women lived to 81.4 on average and men to 76.5, a gap of 4.9 years. Biology seems to explain about a year of it. Most of the rest comes from men dying younger from things linked to how they live. And women spend more of their extra years in poor health.

Isn’t it just hormones?

The usual guess is that women are built to last and men aren’t. The idea sticks because the gap shows up almost everywhere. But a gap that appears everywhere can still come mostly from how people live, and a clever study found a way to pull the two apart.

The monks and nuns of Bavaria

The German demographer Marc Luy looked at more than 11,000 Catholic nuns and monks in Bavaria between 1890 and 1995. Inside the cloisters, men and women lived nearly the same daily life, so most of the differences in how they lived were gone.

In the general German population, the gap between women and men widened a lot after World War II. In the cloisters it stayed almost flat, with nuns only slightly ahead. Luy concluded that biology gives women at most about one year of extra life expectancy at young adult ages. The rest of the widening came from ordinary men, who didn’t share in the falling death rates that women, nuns and especially monks enjoyed.

The simple version

Picture two cars off the same production line. One is driven fast, skips its oil changes and gets left out in the rain. The difference in how long they last comes far more from the driving than from the factory.

Where the gap shows up

Young men die at much higher rates than young women. In the 2024 US life table, a 25-year-old man’s chance of dying that year is about 2.7 times a 25-year-old woman’s. By 80 the gap in death rates has shrunk to about 1.35 times.

The gap in average age reached narrows as people get older.

The gap shows up even among people who never smoked, and smoking makes it wider. In 202,248 US adults followed in the 2000s, 70% of women who never smoked survived from 25 to 79, against 61% of men who never smoked. Among people who kept smoking, it was 38% of women and 26% of men.

The gap is closing a little. It shrank by 0.4 years from 2023 to 2024.

Women’s longer lives, and the healthy part

Living longer isn’t the same as living longer in good health. Across 183 countries, a 2024 study found that the gap between lifespan and healthy lifespan was 2.4 years wider for women than for men. Women gain years, and more of those years come with illness or disability. What is healthspan? has the numbers, and it’s why we’d push strength and balance hardest for women over 60.