How does life expectancy differ between the sexes? This report uses WHO Global Burden of Disease (GBD) data to work it out.
You can download the exact dataset used for this script here.
Life expectancy of women vs men in differerent countries
This graph shows that female life expectancy exceeds male in almost every country in the world. The diagonal line is where the points would lie were female and male LE equal in that country. Only in Afghanistan is male life expectancy greater than female.
This table shows the differences in life expectancies in selected regions:
| location_id | Location | Female LE - Male LE |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Global | 5.1114614 |
| 6 | China | 5.3973055 |
| 80 | France | 5.9028646 |
| 81 | Germany | 4.7725092 |
| 86 | Italy | 4.4653957 |
| 95 | United Kingdom | 3.5423138 |
| 102 | United States | 4.9938900 |
| 135 | Brazil | 7.0818672 |
| 160 | Afghanistan | -0.3642782 |
| 163 | India | 2.3747281 |
| 170 | Congo | 0.1691801 |
| 212 | Mauritania | 0.9057453 |
| 214 | Nigeria | 3.0621790 |
| 44575 | World Bank High Income | 5.3019570 |
| 44578 | World Bank Low Income | 4.3547102 |
Sex difference in life expectancy vs overall life expectancy
Interestingly, there isn't a correlation between the difference in life expectancy between sexes and the overall life expectancy in a country.
About this report
This report was generated from an R script which performs the underlying calculations. The code and console output have been removed to make it easier to read. If you want to see the code, you can check out the latest version at GitHub, and if you want to view the console output, see le-sex-difference.txt.