Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Apr 13:11:100584.
doi: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2020.100584. eCollection 2020 Aug.

Looking for an explanation for the excessive male mortality in England and Wales since the end of the 19th century

Valeria Maiolo  1 , Alice M Reid  2
Affiliations

Looking for an explanation for the excessive male mortality in England and Wales since the end of the 19th century

Valeria Maiolo et al. SSM Popul Health. .

Abstract

Several papers have primarily considered a female disadvantage in mortality as something to explain, considering a male disadvantage to be a "natural condition". Even if, due to biological reasons, shorter life expectancy among males has been demonstrated, other factors need to be involved to explain firstly the increasing, and then the decreasing, of the male relative disadvantage over the past century. The principal aim of this paper is to provide a clearer picture of the major age-class and cause-of-death contributions to male excess mortality in England and Wales from 1881 to 2011. Results indicate a clear shift in contributions to the male disadvantage from differences occurring during the first year of life to those occurring in ageing people, and from tuberculosis, respiratory diseases, external causes and perinatal and congenital conditions to neoplasms and circulatory diseases. In contrast, the narrowing of the gap since 1981 seems to be most closely related to the decrease in the male disadvantage in respiratory diseases and to the simultaneous increasing in the female disadvantage in old-age diseases. The most important novelty of this research relates to the method: instead of using ratios to investigate gender differences in health, we use decomposition methods.

Keywords: Age-cause-specific mortality; Decomposition-analysis; Excess male mortality; Life expectancy; Mortality.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

None.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Sex differences in life expectancy at birth in England & Wales. Source: Authors’ elaboration on data from the Human Mortality Database. Note: Data covering the First and the Second World Wars were removed due to the excessive male mortality during those periods. 1919 data was removed because of the Spanish Flu, and this topic is not analysed in this paper.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Contribution in years of sex-differences in life expectancy by age to the total sex gap. Note: Positive contributions indicate higher male mortality. Source: Authors’ elaboration on data from the Human Mortality Database. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Age-cause-contribution in years to the total sex gap in 1881. Note: Positive contributions indicate higher male mortality. Source: Authors’ elaboration on data from several sources. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Age-cause-contribution in years to the total sex gap in 1951. Note: Positive contributions indicate higher male mortality. Source: Authors’ elaboration on data from several sources. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
Age-cause-contribution in years to the total sex gap in 1971. Note: Positive contributions indicate higher male mortality. Source: Authors’ elaboration on data from several sources. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
Age-cause-contribution in years to the total sex gap in 2011. Note: Positive contributions indicate higher male mortality. Source: Authors’ elaboration on data from several sources. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
Fig. 7
Fig. 7
Cause-contribution in years to the total sex gap from 1881 to 2011. Note: Positive contributions indicate higher male mortality. Source: Authors’ elaboration on data from several sources. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)
Fig. 8
Fig. 8
Annual tobacco consumption per adult. Source: Royal College of Physicians of London (1962, p. 81), “Smoking and Health” (p. 14).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Beam C.R., Kaneshiro C., Jang J.Y., Reynolds C.A., Pedersen N.L., Gatz M. Differences between women and men in incidence rates of dementia and alzheimer's disease. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. 2018;64(4):1077–1083. doi: 10.3233/JAD-180141. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Beltrán-Sánchez H., Finch C.E., Crimmins E.M. Twentieth century surge of excess adult male mortality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2015;112:8993–8998. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1421942112. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Chung F., Barnes N., Allen M., Angus R., Corris P., Knox A. Assessing the burden of respiratory disease in the UK. Respiratory Medicine. 2002;96:963–975. doi: 10.1053/rmed.2002.1392. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Davenport R.J. Annual deaths by cause, age and sex in England and Wales, 1848-1900. Economic and social data services (SN5705) 2007. - DOI
    1. Dinges M., Weigl A. Gender gap similarities and differences in Europe. In: Dinges M., Weigl A., editors. Vol. 58. Franz Steiner Verlag; 2016. pp. 187–216. (Gender-specific life expectancy in Europe 1850-2010).

LinkOut - more resources

  NODES
COMMUNITY 2
INTERN 2
Note 12
twitter 2