Revealing Patterns: A Cross-Country Analysis of the Gender Gap in Mortality

Nadine Zielonke, Vienna Institute of Demography

This study intends to uncover explanations of the different country-patterns of the gender gap in mortality (concerning life expectancy at birth). Throughout the 20th century, until the 1970s/1980s the mortality differences between women and men in developed countries were generally increasing in favor of women. Since then four different patterns arose: a narrowing, a plateau, an increasing, and a roller-coaster pattern. In a first step the Human Mortality Database was used to calculate sex-specific life tables for 26 countries and to decompose the overall differences in life expectancy at birth between women and men into absolute and relative contributions of all single age groups. In a next step we seek to explain those country-specific differences, i.e. the four patterns mentioned above, by an in-depth analysis using SHARE (Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe) to understand what might be hidden behind those age patterns of the gender gap in mortality.