Differences in the life expectancies of the sexes in various countries in the world

This page contains statistics on the life expectancies of the sexes in various countries in the world.

With the exception of seven countries (Nepal, Bangladesh, Malawi, Niger, Namibia, Bhutan and Afghanistan), in all other countries listed in Table B women live longer than do men, in some countries by a considerable margin.

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Life Expectancy is not the only measure of quality of life.   The UN has since 1990 annually published a Human Development Index that ranks countries' quality of life by a combination of indicators, such as life expectancy, availability of schooling (but not the quality of schooling), the GDP, availability of health care (but not the quality of health care) and more. The UN Human Development Index has shortcomings that have been addressed by the Fraser Institute in a more realistic alternative to the UN Human Development Index.
   An additional indicator that should be used by the UN as well as by the Fraser Institute to measure the quality of life in a given nation is a measure of how happy people in a nation are with the quality of lives.  Suicide rates are a very good indicator that can be be used for that.  It surely can be no accident that the rankings of nations according to life-expectancies very closely matches that according to suicide rates.
   By both of these measures, life expectancies as well as suicide rates, men's lives are almost exclusively in all nations far worse than those of women's.

The average of the differences in life expectancies for the sexes in the countries listed in Table B is 5.09 years (by which the life expectancy of men is less than that of the women in a given country).  Turkey is the country in which the difference in the life expectancies of the sexes is closest to the average of all countries.

Russia leads the list with the greatest difference in the life expectancies of the sexes (12.89 years less for men), followed almost exclusively by formerly communist countries — countries in which affirmative action for women made the largest advances for the longest intervals.

Afghanistan is the country that has the largest difference in favour of the average life expectancy of men over women (one year).

Almost all of the developed nations have differences in the average life expectancies that are on average slightly above the average for all countries.  See Table A for details.

Women: Victims of Men's Shorter Life Span (off-site)

Table A

Table B

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Posted 2000 09 22
Updates:
2001 02 05 (format changes)
2001 10 29 (added note about an Alternative to UN's Human Development Index
2006 08 17 (reformated page to conform with design standard; added comment on the correlation between suicide rates and life expectancies)