"Men die earlier than women!" This is a common interpretation of the different life expectations of the two sexes. In Germany they differ by around five years. However, the number is veiled that two out of five men live longer worldwide than women, as researchers from the Southern Dänische Universität calculated in Odense. The team led by Marie-Pier Bergeron-Boucher published the new method for analyzing gender differences in aging in the specialist magazine »BMJ Open«.
Life expectancy is how old people get on average. However, the statistical dispersion is neglected, i.e. how significantly the individual data points deviate from the average value. In most countries, more boys die than girls, which increases the spread of the life span of men.
Instead of an average value, the research group therefore calculated the probability with which a man lives longer than a woman. To this end, the researchers from huge data records randomly chose the death dates of a man and a woman and looked who got older of both. The entirety of the comparisons resulted in a kind of survival probability of men, which was around 40 percent worldwide. For Germany, the researchers calculated a value of 39 percent. So it would be misleading to say that men are fundamentally disadvantaged by differences in the lifespan, the team around Bergeron-Boucher concludes.
More detailed analyses of death registers from the USA, for example, showed that every second married man survives an unmarried woman. The same applies to men with a university degree compared to women without a high school degree. "A blind interpretation of the differences in life expectancy can sometimes lead to a distorted perception of the actual inequalities," the demographers write.
However, the calculated probability of survival of men cannot be interpreted easily: Even with a value of 50 percent, there can be gender inequalities. In India, girls die more often than boys, from adolescence the female death rate is lower, which leads to a relatively balanced probability of survival. In addition, the number does not say anything about medical care in general. Almost every second man survives a woman in West Africa, the life expectancy is under the age of 60. Even if the new level is helpful to examine gender differences, such complex relationships cannot be reduced to a single number.
