Death & Sex Difference

    I always find the sex difference with death to be quite interesting.  That women live longer and men are more likely to die young.  Thus I thought it was time for a little bit of social sciences and statistics.  In this post I look briefly at differences in deaths related to sex.  I do not look at race or location, although there are some interesting numbers there.


    It has long been understood that men die sooner than women on average.  The life expectancy for those born in 2006 is 78.7 for boys and 83.5 for girls in Australia.  However for those who were 25 in 2006 it is 79.7 for boys and 84.2 for girls.  Here we see that not only do girls have a higher life expectancy on average but that the life expectancy is dropping.  I already have a post on how obesity is changing the funeral industry here.  But people have asked me about this, so I might make another more thought our post later. For now back to sex differences in death.

    So far we have found that women live longer than men on average.  However there is more to this if we look closer.  There were 143,500 deaths in Australia in 2010.  Of that 73,500 were male and 70,000 were female.  Men not only die sooner than women, but they also outnumber women in terms of total deaths per year.

    Now let's compare deaths over age in regards to gender.  We see in figure 1. that death rates for men peaks shapely in ages 15-20 and remains high until about 35 where it rises again.  On the other hand figure 2. shows that the death rate for women does jump at 15, but is not as high a jump as for men.  Also the death rates are not stable for women, they go up and down until 35.

Figure 1.  Deaths of male population in Australia.

Figure 2.  Deaths of female population in Australia.

    Again, the two graphs illustrate that men are simply more likely to die than women.  Which does make sense from an evolutionary and social perspective.  There are a variety of reasons for this difference in death rates.  Too many for me to cover, nor is it something I want to cover.  I simply aimed to explore the gender difference in death.


References:

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Products/6F9B1EB9FE12633CCA257943000CED60?opendocument

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Products/8D107FC8CC704456CA257943000CEDA6?opendocument

http://www.aihw.gov.au/life-expectancy/

<> I know I did not reference correctly, but this is not an academic thing.  These references will get you to the information if you want <>

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