Gender Gap in Life Expectancy: Age- and Cause-Specific Decomposition of Ten Countries.

Alessandro Feraldi , Sapienza Università di Roma

On average worldwide, women tend to live significantly longer than men and largest absolute difference between male and female mortality risk reaches its maximum at old ages. This paper contributes on the development of gender gaps in life expectancy at birth by comparing ten European and non-European countries. We investigate the evolution of the age-specific contributions to the gender gap, according to different causes of death. Arriaga’s method is applied to decompose gender gap in life expectancy by ages and causes of death. We use period life tables from Human Mortality Database as well as all-cause death counts from the Human Cause-of-Death Database over the last 12-year period available for each country. Neoplasm, Heart diseases and External causes are main drivers of gender gaps in all the countries, together with minor contributors such as cerebrovascular and respiratory diseases. We identify three different main patterns in the development of age-specific contributions to the gender gap, according to causes of death. Largest age-specific contributions to the gender gap in mortality, for most of the causes of death, are shifting towards older ages. These shifts are often followed by lowering in the distributions of age-specific contributions in most of the countries.

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 Presented in Session P2. Poster Session Ageing, Health and Mortality