19 November 2017

Narrowing the Gender Gap

There's good news from Statistics Canada, and not only because of a slight improvement in timeliness. On Thursday they released Deaths and causes of death, 2014 several months in advance of the previous schedule.

While Canada in 2014 saw slightly more male deaths (130,761) than female deaths (128,060) these numbers have been converging over the last three decades. There is a more rapid decline in male mortality than in female mortality since the late 1970s because women's and men's lifestyles have become increasingly similar.

The 2012/2014 statistics show Canadian life expectancy at birth reached 79.7 years for men and 83.9 years for women. Every year over the last 30 years, life expectancy at birth has increased by an average of 2.9 months for men and 1.8 months for women in Canada. As a result, the gap in life expectancy between men and women was reduced to 4.2 years, compared to more than seven years at the beginning of the 1980s.

Other good news is that infant mortality was the lowest rate observed in Canadian history. It's 4.7 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2014 compared to 77.4 in 1921.

1 comment:

  1. Any statistic on mortality of women having babies? As an amateur genealogist, I am aware that many women died either in childbirth or even a month or two afterward. They often had their last child when they were 41-43 years old. I do know that the last child was sometimes the first child of an unwed daughter.

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