Women Live Longer Than Men but Spend More Years in Poor Health: 7 Ways to Protect Your Golden Decades

You will probably outlive the men around you. In the UK, women live around four years longer than men, yet the number of years both sexes spend in good health is almost identical. On average, the extra years women gain are years lived with illness or disability.

For most of the past decade, longevity has been sold as a project for men: fasting protocols, cold plunges and supplement stacks tested largely on male bodies. For decades, women of childbearing age were routinely left out of early drug trials, a practice the United States did not formally reverse until 1993. Much of the advice on living longer still rests on evidence gathered mostly from men.

That is starting to change. The wellness industry's longest-running annual forecast put women's longevity at the top of its 2026 list, and clinics and researchers are beginning to design around female biology: the menopause transition, bone density and the different way heart disease shows up in women.