While conventional knowledge seems to point to men having shorter lives than women, recent study from BMJ Open questions this notion.
The study required the researchers to use a specialized statistical method called “outsurvival” statistic in which it measures the probability that a person from a given population with a high death rate will outlive someone from that population with a low death rate. The used this method to study the sex differences in death in almost 200 populations over the past 200 years.
The investigator used date from life tables by sex and individual years from 41 countries from the Human Mortality Database and abridged life tables from the World Population Prospects 2019. This abridged life table provides sex-specific life tables from 199 countries by 5-year age groups and in 5-year period ranging from 1950-1954 to 2015-2019. They also utilized additional databases from Germany and the UK. The also compared the probabiltiy of men outliving women by education attainment and marital status from the US.
They found that 1-2 out of every 4 men have outlived women for the past 200 years. The probability of males living longer than females is generally higher in low and middle income countries, however this does not necessarily mean greater gender equality in survival due to other circumstances such as death rates in children tend to lean higher in females in certain countries.
In the US between 2015 to 2019, the probability of males outliving females was 40%. However, there are differences between men who were married and educated versus those that weren’t. The probability of men outliving women was 37% for men who weren’t married and was found to increase to 39% for those who were married as men seems to benefit from being in a stable relationship. The researchers also found that education also made a difference in that the probability for men who had university degrees was 43% and 39% for those without a high school diploma.
The study also points out that sex simply is not enough to determine longevity. For instance, college educated men have a longevity advantage over women with only a high school diploma.
While bringing into question the common notion that women tend to live longer than men, it is also important to know that lifestyle and other various reasons and causes can increase or decreases the probability of death for men and women through various stages in life.
MP Bergeron-Boucher et al. Probability of males to outlive females: an international comparison from 1751 to 2020. BMJ Open (2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2021-059964
