Most men die before women do in the United States
In 2021, American women lived, on average, 79 years.
However, life expectancy for American men was only
about 73 years.
This isn't just true of the US.
Women outlive men in 37 other comparable countries.
As long as records have been kept in an all countries,
women have lived longer than men.
Across basically almost every major cause of death,
men are more likely to die than women are.
The United States has the highest rate of avoidable
deaths among men or deaths before the age of 75 than
any comparable country.
For every 100,000 men in the US, 337 die of avoidable
causes. That's over 100 more men than in the UK, the
country with the second highest rate, and more than
double the number of Swiss men who die prematurely.
It's not that old women outlive old men.
It's that men tend to be outlived by women in just
about every age cohort.
Demography really is destiny.
If you change the shape of people, you change the shape
of everything.
The US and countries around the world are undergoing
rapid population aging.
This can have serious implications for society as
a whole.
Because women can expect to live longer, but they've had
lower earnings.
They've had patchier careers.
But they still have to support a longer retirement
because they live longer.
And so it's a particular challenge for women.
So why do men die before women and what can we do
about it?
So when you hear that the life expectancy in 2021 was
76.1 years, it means that on average people who died
in that in 2021 died at the age of 76 years.
Well, the size of this life expectancy gap between men
and women differs across places.
Women always live longer, and this is due to a
combination of biological, social and behavioral
factors.
There's some evidence that biological differences
between men and women can contribute to the life
expectancy gap. But biology is not the only explanation.
Understanding the role of particular sex linked genes,
exposure to hormone profiles that differ between
males and females, but also differences in factors
related to health behaviors such as smoking, engaging in
risky behaviors.
I see this particularly at younger ages.
Men tend to be more likely to die from things like
accidents, suggesting that there are some behavioral
things, the sort of stereotypical stories guys
ride in their motorcycles around and that women are
less likely to do things like that.
And that's part of why they live longer.
Men are also less likely to seek out mental health
treatment than women. Suicide is one of the
leading causes of death among men, and they are four
times more likely to die due to suicide than women.
That men are just socialized to live riskier lives if
they don't go to the doctor. When they do go to
the doctor, they don't listen to the doctor's
advice. When they're prescribed medication, they
don't finish their medication. So there's a
whole area of men's health that relates to things like
watching, monitoring, doing the things that women are
more likely to do, which is one of the reasons that they
live longer, that men have not been socialized to do to
the same extent.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that
men are more likely to die due to work related
incidents, and this is because men are more likely
to work in the most dangerous jobs in the
country. So industries like logging, fishing and
hunting, construction and mining.
The numbers also get more complicated when factoring
in race.
African-American men are tremendously disadvantaged
in terms of the likelihood that they will live long,
healthy lives. But this is due to social factors.
So exposure to subpar medical care, racial
discrimination in everyday life, major episodes of
discrimination, exposure and the stress that
causes.
There's also a disparity in mortality rates among
transgender people.
People who are on the trans feminine to non-binary
spectrum are at the greatest risk of mortality
compared to non-trans men and women.
Experts suspect this gap is a result of both biological
and social factors, but they say that more research
is needed to fully understand the causes behind
the disparity.
You know, it's funny, when I give public presentations on
this and I say, you know, men are much more likely to
die in a car accident, you know, everything stupid that
you can do, men are much more likely than women to do
it to kill themselves. And people laugh, you know, and
it's not a joke.
There hasn't always been a life expectancy gap between
men and women. What became known as "the female
advantage" emerged around 1890 and continued to grow
throughout the 20th century, except for a
decline during the 1918 flu pandemic.
This change over time suggests to researchers that
there could be an environmental component to
life expectancy.
That means there are some steps we can take to work
towards helping men live longer.
Everybody, men as well as women, benefit from a suite
of particular behaviors.
So, for example, a healthy diet, getting physical
activity, not smoking, no to moderate alcohol
consumption, maintaining deep supportive social
relationships. These are things that benefit
everybody, including men.
What is it about the socialization of men that
means that they're not participating in the health
care system the way they should be to extend their
lives?
Public policy measures can also be taken to improve
men's health.
So, for example, in Russia, the life expectancy gap
between men and women is huge.
One of the factors that was isolated was the
exceptionally high use of alcohol by Russian men.
And there was actually a policy change a few decades
ago where they eliminated the sale of vodka before
lunch time and life expectancy for men went up.
That's suggests fairly convincingly that there's
something about behaviors, social behaviors, which are
also modifiable, which I think provides a lot of hope
for for everybody, whether, however you identify.
Other policies have proven effective at decreasing
mortality among men.
Restricting access to guns has shown a decrease in
death by suicide.
Labor policies that increase paid sick leave,
provide disability insurance and establish
higher minimum wages show a correlation with a decrease
in deaths among all working age adults.
Men with lower income or more financial stress are
more likely to have chronic medical conditions.
One of the things that's potentially encouraging
about this is that the nature of work is changing.
How people do their work can change.
So this suggests potential targets for improving the
health of the population.
The life expectancy statistics are averages.
They're probabilistic, they're not deterministic.
This isn't fate.
The life expectancy gender gap can have a major impact
on retirement. The numbers we've presented so far are
the average life expectancy from birth for each gender.
Researchers also look at the life expectancy from age
65 onward.
The average 65 year old woman living in the U.S.
can expect to live about another 20 years, whereas
men can only expect to live another 17.
If you make it to age 60 to 65, you can still expect to
live a pretty long time.
And that's especially so for people in the top half
of the income distribution, for people who have college
degrees. And that means that they can expect a
pretty long lifespan.
And I would say it's a particular issue for women
because women can expect to live longer, but they've had
lower earnings, they've had patchier careers because of
caregiving, both for children and often for for
elders.
Not only do American women live longer on average, but
they're more likely than men to have no retirement
savings. This could be due to women earning less on
average over their lifetimes than men do
People are living longer, which implies that we need
to spend more time in the workforce with people having
the potential to live longer.
This implies that we rethink our life course in
terms of the amount of time we spend in the workforce
relative to retirement.
And a big obstacle that we see is employment
opportunities for older workers.
If you have a much older population, the types of
demands that it's going to be making on the marketplace
and governments is going to be very different.
If you have a much more female population, there are
probably going to be different too.
Women are more likely to depend on Social Security
benefits than men.
42% of elderly women receiving Social Security
depend on it for at least half of their income,
compared to 37% of men.
15% of female Social Security beneficiaries rely
on it for 90% or more of their income.
Roughly 15% of the federal budget in fiscal year 2022
went toward funding the Social Security
Administration, which amounts to nearly $1.4
trillion. The government estimates that the Social
Security reserves will run out by 2037.
Think of Social Security as a pay as you go system.
We have more baby boomers retiring than people in the
workforce that are paying into the system.
This lack of resources can present a problem for
retired women.
But by the time you reach about the age of 40, there
are more women in that country usually than there
are men. Why does nobody sell anything to older
women? Why does nobody design anything for older
women? Older women tend to be a pretty powerful group
in most Western countries, but there's no political
party that targets them.
The marketplace doesn't acknowledge that they exist.