The Gap in Gender Life Expectancy Keeps Growing

My wife sometimes reminds me, when we get on the topic, that she has a feeling I will pass away before her. Thanks for the confidence, honey. I get her point, though. Generally speaking, women outlive men. But the gap in terms of years continues to grow even as the US overall life expectancy drops much faster than comparable developed countries.…CONTINUE READING

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation:

U.S. life expectancy at birth fell by 2.4 years between 2019 and 2021 — from 78.8 to 76.4. In comparable countries, the average life expectancy fell only 0.3 years — from 82.6 to 82.3. Meanwhile, U.S. healthcare spending per person remains the highest and was nearly double that of similarly large and wealthy nations in 2021.

But it is the gap between men and women that is interesting. A new JAMA research letter released yesterday confirms a worsening gap that is bigger than it has been in almost 20 years.

The gender life expectancy gap increased 0.23 years from 2010 to 2019 and 0.70 years from 2019 to 2021. So, a much larger jump has been seen in the last few years compared to the decade prior. From 2010–2019, the biggest contributor to the gap was from unintentional injuries.

From 2019–2021, COVID-19 took over as the main contributor to the gap. Unintentional injuries came in a close second, and the authors postulate that this is likely mostly from drug overdose deaths.

So, the data is essentially saying COVID had a disproportionately higher toll on men than women. The likelihood of this has to do with the overall reasons why men die at younger ages compared to women. COVID accelerated that decline, it seems.

Men experienced higher COVID-19 death rates for likely multifactorial reasons, including higher burden of comorbidities and differences in health behaviors and socioeconomic factors, such as labor force participation, incarceration, and homelessness.

This partially explains more COVID deaths in men, but there are many reasons postulated as to why there is a gap at all. I want to touch on three key factors that make…