Thank you very much for your kind comment! I think the data just looks very cool like this. I actually want to use the graphs in teaching, hopefully the students will also like it.
Could you change 'deaths of despair' to suicide? It sounds poetic but suicide should have more prominence as a big factor in male death.
Yes it's refreshing to see an actualy 'dataisbeaitful' graph.
Also I have never seen this type of mortality graphs before, but they are very insightful.
You can also see prominently that the mortality in men rises suddenly around 20.
Hi, thank you for your kind comment and feedback!
I totally agree that male suicides deserve more attention. It is shocking to see how high the numbers are. I use the term deaths of despair since it is widely used in demography as it also includes drug overdoses and sometimes alcoholic liver diseases. I think historically, these causes of deaths were often not clearly distinguished, and therefore, this broader category is used. I guess it can also be quite challenging in some cases to establish the exact cause of death. Maybe someone with a background in medicine or epidemiology knows more about this classification! But yes, I think for more modern data, it is outdated and should probably be changed.
I think the causes are often distinguished but the point around deaths from alcoholism, overdosing other drugs, and suicide is that there's much higher incidence found in deprived areas - hence considering together in this way.
Agree that the term sounds quite antiquated, which probably reflects how this is a problem that has existed for a long time.
Hi, thanks for your comment! I was thinking the same thing. Maybe at that time, maternal deaths were so high that they countered the higher risks of accidents for males in that age group, but once there were improvements in maternal health that disappeared. But I am not sure if it makes sense in all countries (e.g. Italy). Maybe someone who knows more about public health can tell us more!
IIRC, Pre modern medicine (prevalence of germ theory - late 1800s, 1940s - Penicillin? unsure of "modern" maternal care history), maternal mortality ran around 10%. So that would track.
Pretty sure Penicillin wasn't widely adopted till post WW2, but also pretty sure that germ theory and hence importance of cleanliness was well understood by the 1930s.
It seems young for maternal deaths... That looks like 14-16, which in those nations in that time period seems young (though the way the graph displays that????) The "red cloud" even extends to younger ages, which makes less sense.
I'd expect that line to be closer to 20 years old for those nations.
It could be just that.... These are teenage pregnancies.
Teens 15-17 just don't die at a high rate. They they tend to be healthy, by virtue of diseases having killed off the vulnerable already, and not yet involved in dangerous activity.
In the US today, the top two causes car accidents and drowning. So cross off car accidents before 1930... and there probably wasn't as much recreational swimming.
In other words, even if 15 is an unusually early age to get pregnant, it's also a dangerous age, and even a few deaths at this age is going to show up in the data.
Not sure where you got your data, but top causes of death at least in this article linked from data in 2013-2016 echoes usual numbers of adolescent deaths: MVA, suicide, homicide. Old days what we used to learn was: Accident, then homicide, then suicide.
There definitely is not that many folks dying of drowning (as you can tell from the link).
[https://www.ajc.com/news/national/what-killing-america-teens-inside-cdc-new-mortality-report/OeNlRXFCJqxZz5H7LsL5zJ/](https://www.ajc.com/news/national/what-killing-america-teens-inside-cdc-new-mortality-report/OeNlRXFCJqxZz5H7LsL5zJ/)
I am afraid the explanation of “teen pregnancies” (and the clump in some countries drop to disturbingly low ages) may be very grim. These extremely young pregnancies I suspect are the least wanted pregnancies. Least wanted by the: pregnant female, biological father, and parents and family of the impregnated and impregnator. Could it be increases in murder and suicide? A few studies showed the leading cause of death amongst US pregnant women in the last 20 years has been homicide. [link](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8020563/). Maybe combined with teen pregnancies are riskier than for women in their 20’s?
[link](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC411126/)
If these plots are based on the ratios of the male vs female deaths, then how is it that along a diagonal line (a cohort) we don’t see a nearly even amount of blue and red?
Is it perhaps that the colors aren’t based on the NUMBER of deaths, but instead based on the fraction of people available to be counted in that gender / cohort who were available to die? This would mean that if we started out with even numbers of males and females and half of the cohort of males died in a war, then the expected gender-neutral death ratio after would be females 2:1 ?
I think that what u/Objective_Economy281 is saying is (and sorry if I got it wrong), that if we see men die more frequently at younger ages, then we should expect to see more women than men dying at older ages. There should be an inversion of color, with a certain age at which it's 50/50.
If we don't see it, then probably the graph doesn't represent male\_deaths / female deaths, but rather (male\_deaths / males\_alive\_at\_age) / (female\_deaths / females\_alive\_at\_age).
Hope I got it right; if so, I concur.
It also makes sense considering OP's text "calculated by dividing male death rates by female death rates".
I agree that dying during childbirth is a big factor for young first time mothers, but I think a large factor for those women is also failed abortions leading to deaths. For young women who became pregnant with fathers that would not marry them, shady abortion practices would have been more prevalent than today.
If child birth was the risk factor, then the excess female deaths shouldn't show up as a band around 17-20 years. Women give birth after that age, too. Unless the first child carries significantly higher risks,
WHO stats on childbirth risk backs up that childbearing before the age of 20 comes with significant risks of birth injury and death [https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-pregnancy](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-pregnancy)
>Adolescent mothers (aged 10–19 years) face higher risks of eclampsia, puerperal endometritis and systemic infections than women aged 20–24 years
For many of the countries you can see excess female deaths in the 25-40 range as well. There are a couple of reasons I can think of for this pattern. One is that teenage pregnancies were more likely to end in death because the body is not yet fully developed. Another is that even though deaths in childbirth were still common for women in their twenties, excess male deaths were even more common at that age because of young men entering dangerous professions and engaging in risky activities upon leaving home.
Your reasoning is wrong. Teenage pregnancies and first births don't need to be riskier than later births. They just need to be riskier than what teenage men are doing and less risky than what adult men are doing.
From a [CDC report](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm):
>Maternal mortality rates were highest in this century during 1900-1930. Poor obstetric education and delivery practices were mainly responsible for the high numbers of maternal deaths, most of which were preventable. Obstetrics as a speciality was shunned by many physicians, and obstetric care was provided by poorly trained or untrained medical practitioners. Most births occurred at home with the assistance of midwives or general practitioners. Inappropriate and excessive surgical and obstetric interventions (e.g., induction of labor, use of forceps, episiotomy, and cesarean deliveries) were common and increased during the 1920s. Deliveries, including some surgical interventions, were performed without following the principles of asepsis. As a result, 40% of maternal deaths were caused by sepsis (half following delivery and half associated with illegally induced abortion) with the remaining deaths primarily attributed to hemorrhage and toxemia.
>The 1933 White House Conference on Child Health Protection, Fetal, Newborn, and Maternal Mortality and Morbidity report demonstrated the link between poor aseptic practice, excessive operative deliveries, and high maternal mortality. This and earlier reports focused attention on the state of maternal health and led to calls for action by state medical associations. During the 1930s-1940s, hospital and state maternal mortality review committees were established. During the ensuing years, institutional practice guidelines and guidelines defining physician qualifications needed for hospital delivery privileges were developed. At the same time, a shift from home to hospital deliveries was occurring throughout the country; during 1938-1948, the proportion of infants born in hospitals increased from 55% to 90%.
That, the first birth being the most dangerous, and young mothers being most at-risk, seem to account for those awful horizontal blobs.
(I recognize the graphs don't cover the US, but am guessing the trend was widespread as medical innovations would've impacted all these countries roughly equally.)
Pretty much all big improvements in reducing mortality rate during birth for mothers, that affects younger women more often, became subsequently broadly available after WW1. Blood transfusions, Caesarean section, antibiotics, anesthesia advances, surgical suture, the principles of asepsis.
Sadly i can't find a detailed statistic for that time other than that the high mortality rate has been almost eliminated between 1890 and 1980 in the first world.
IIRC this is about the time doctors started widely adopting the practice of washing their hands between handling patients with infectious disease and delivering babies. Ignaz Semmelweis is today credited with the discovery that this reduces infant and mother mortality by a substantial margin. He made this discovery in the mid-1800s but was largely discredited and ignored because of ignorance and stubbornness by the medical community at large. It was only after many more trials and a world war in which far too many men lost their lives to poor medical hygeine that the process was adopted more widely.
Had he been listened to from the beginning, tens or even hundreds of thousands of women could have been saved from death during birth.
In any case, the adoption of this and other aseptic processes and the corresponding decrease in the rate of maternal death during childbirth are probably responsible for the trend displayed here.
This is fantastic. You can see wars, maternal health advances, and the rise and fall of the Mad Men lifestyle on the same graph.
Also, it's handy how you can follow the diagonal grid lines from a point on the plot to find the birth year on the x-axis.
ETA: and all those young male deaths post 1950 has to be car crashes, right?
Thank you for your kind comment and feedback! I agree that lexis diagrams are very insightful to spot trends. And yes, I think a large chunk of male deaths are traffic accidents (also motorcycles) but also more risky occupations, alcohol and deaths of despair. All of which strongly impact young males. But for that one, one actually needs to plot cause of deaths, and that data is a bit harder to get.
I think it's a neat visualization, but I am puzzled by one thing I hope you can help explain: if we assume that by age ~100 pretty much everyone is dead and that roughly even numbers of men and women are born each year, I'd assume that any male excess mortality should be followed by a female excess mortality at some point (since there are fewer males left, so more females will die in comparison to the males). As such, does it compare each year to all people alive at the start of the year instead of all people born from the same year?
I have no idea, but could it be that:
Year 80 there’s 100 men and women left
Year 81 20/15 die: 20% men, 15% women, 80 and 85 left
Year 82 15/15 die: 19% men, 18% women, 65 and 70 left
Year 83 10/11 die: 15,3% men, 14,8% women, 55 and 59 left
So more women are dying in total, but there’s less men to begin with, so a bigger share of men have died? Idk, I’m tired, so my example might not make sense
I'm really struck by the sudden post-war region of late-age male deaths that started in the 1950's and largely ended in the 1990's except in France and Finland where it is taking much longer. I wonder what contributed to the rise and fall of the phenomenon. Consequence of wartime stress on the survivors?
Also intriguing is the high-intensity static among the population of the young starting in the 80's, where there are extreme swings between boys and girls between both year and age.
Yeah I interpreted the big swings in the gender mortality ratio among young kids as evidence that fewer young kids are dying.
I'm not a statistician, but maybe the mean number of deaths for each age/sex cohort is going down, but the standard deviation isn't going down as much. That would explain relatively large swings from year to year between the sexes.
I am not sure at all so take it with a grain of salt but I think tobacco & alcohol consumption would be major factors. Smoking in France in particular was highly prevalent among males and has declined a lot (or is even equalizing between genders).
I wonder whether it's smoking. In some countries, it's concentrated on the cohorts that served in the Second World War (and were often supplied with cigarettes in their rations), while other countries it lasts longer. I'd be very interested to know whether the difference correlates with smoking rates.
Yeah, the diagonal grid lines are really helpful. On graphs with a piece missing from the "mad men" blob, you can trace the diagonal and see that it overlaps with more war deaths.
Thank you for the comment! Yes, that is a good idea, I have checked, and there is data on the US and Canada, so maybe I will do a follow-up post! In theory, the male excess death should be much higher in the world wars. Maybe one would even need to extend the scale.
I made a new post with data from the US and Canada and some other countries. Unfortunately their data does not go back si for but maybe you still like it!
Thank you. This is a very straightforward observation I never thought about, but yes, I think that is probably true since more women survive into old age.
I would even assume that it’s what you can see in your plots, as most graphs have a band of red at the top >90! I noticed this immediately :)
I guess at older ages, more women die because there are more women still alive at these ages…? Or how would it work in the context of how you define the ratios? Is it a ratio compared to how many M:F existed at their birth year, or is it moving ie with how many others are alive at that age in that point of time?
It does seem odd that all these are predominantly blue until very old age. You'd think that big predominance of male deaths would lead to later excess of female deaths. Nonagenarians is a very small population in any case.
Yea, I’m not understanding why pink is so rare to find in the graph. It doesn’t need to be 50/50 but it doesn’t seem mathematically possible that almost always at a given age that more men are dying
Edit: looking at the chart, maybe the women just haven’t died yet? Would still expect to see the pink make a bigger comeback for birth years 1910-1930
Remember, this is comparing *rates* to *rates.* Most very old deaths are women, but that's being divided by the total population of very old people, which is also overwhelmingly women.
Put another way, men of all ages are more likely to die than women of the same age; there's nothing inconsistent about that, as the rates don't need to balance overall.
There are ‘striations’ running diagonally up to the right, particularly for Spain, is this a normalization artefact or something real? Also, most countries show a cluster of excess female deaths at very high ages, but not all!
Thanks for your comment! I actually don't know what is going on in Spain, but it looks artificial, maybe some data quality/collection issues. I can look into it!
I think the high mortality ratios for females in high ages could be because so few males survive into old age, meaning that those who are left are maybe very resilient? So it is a selection bias by health, but I'm not sure. Maybe someone in the comments knows more.
The diagonal stripes could imply health care practices adapted for age groups during some years? E.g. if some vaccinations would affect female/male mortality more, like the one against HPV that reduces risk of uterine cancer.
The diagonals in Spain could be due to kids not knowing their age that was just given a round number for birthdate. Like "you were born around 1880 but don't know the exact date? Well, 1880 it is". That create more people from those year. If we assume that previous to 1900 more women were dying young, than means a lot of women that had this "feature" were already dead and now we see the man with this feature dying.
These are incredible.
Quite a few countries exhibit a concentration of excess male deaths for 60 year olds around 1970. Is there a canonical explanation for this feature? These would be men who’d have fought through WW2, survived, and then succumbed 30 years later.
And on that note, do you have the data for Germany?
Thank you for your kind comment! Yes, I briefly mention it in the description, and it is also discussed in the paper, which inspired the graphs. The most common explanation are very high smoking rates among males in that cohort. Smoking rates in most European countries were a lot higher back then, and it was socially not acceptable for women to smoke. This changed first in Denmark, which is why excess male deaths are lower since danish women started smoking very heavily. But there might be other reasons! Negative health effects from surviving World War 2 could also play a role.
Data for Germany exists but only in high quality since the 1950s , and it can get a bit tricky with the separation between West and East Germany. That's why I usually don't work with German data when it comes to more fun graphs and long historic comparisons. Historically, Germany is probably one of the most fascinating cases.
If those huge blue blobs between 60 and 80 years between the 70’s and roughly 2000 are due to smoking, the cigarette industry body count is just stupendous. Years post ww2 one would expect death ratio in the older (> 60) population to skew in the direction of females, because more of them survived? Really interesting graphics. Thnx.
Yeah, I agree. Some demographers actually refer to it as the "smoking epidemic" because it has such a strong impact on mortality. But if course this is only one factor (yet a very strong one). A cool comparison would be with countries that always smoked less or decreased total smoking rates a lot quicker. I'm not sure, but I think sweden smokes a lot less today, but I don't know how it was historically.
Thanks for the detailed answer, and sorry I missed it in your initial post text. “Smoking”. Obvious when it’s pointed out.
A different question for you: have you tried making further colour bins for the “> 100%” male excess deaths category. I feel like the two world wars would have excess male deaths far beyond 100%.
Hi, yes, I have done that for some individual countries, but then it really messes up things in countries that were not or less impacted by the wars. And since I want to use them for teaching, I thought that having the same scale is more important. I tried to make a scale that was comparable across multiple countries, but maybe I should have extended it further.
But you are totally right. The numbers for France in 1940, for example, are staggeringly high! Maybe I will make a follow-up post for some of the countries. Thank you!
This is one of the most interesting, well-designed, and comprehensively documented visualisations I've ever seen on this sub. The quality of submissions on /r/dataisbeautiful is awful, and I don't understand why the moderators aren't doing their jobs, but it's rare gems like this that keep me subscribed. Would I be right to guess that you work with data professionally?
Thank you very much for your kind comment! Yes I do research and also teach quantitative methods. I also want to use these graphs for teaching and this was a bit of a trial whether they are understandable.
Thanks for your comment! You really can! I guess it is a combination of risky behaviour (e.g, driving motorcycles), alcohol and higher risks of workplace accidents. It is crazy that you can see across all of the countries that strongly!
In England and Wales the school leaving age was raised in stages from 14 to 18, with 16 being the age from the mid-1970s to the 2000s. You can see both the threshold and the changes in the chart, though the changes don't exactly match the years when the law changed, perhaps because the law lagged common practice.
What's going on with people 5-10? That cohort started with excess female mortality, switched to excess male mortality by the 50's, and maybe now is a mess (small sample size issues?)
I wouldn't think maternal health changes would make much of a difference for 5 year olds.
Thank you for the comment. That is a very good question, indeed. I do not actually know, but yeah, maybe it has to do with small sample sizes? Also, I think the excess mortality is over really string in that agreement group, so maybe it might be explained by some diseases that slightly impact girls aged 5-10 more? Or maybe child labour in factories? Really not sure. Maybe someone in the comments who knows more about epidemiology or public health can help out
I noticed the same thing and was wondering if cultural preferences for boys ('heirs') around 1900 could have led parents to dedicate more resources (milk, food, medicine, $$) to ensuring their sons survived infancy/childhood? Just a theory, would love to hear from anyone who has thoughts/data on that
Thanks for your comment! I totally agree, and in other countries, you can see other conflicts like the Spanish Civil War or even the finish civil war (only 1918). And I think that in the Netherlands and France you can even see the phases of the second world war. At least, that is my speculation, but I might also be delayed data collection.
Thanks for your comment. It's a really good question. I speculated in some other comments about it, but I really do not know. I will investigate and if you find something I will come back to you. Unfortunately, I do not have a clue about historic child mortality, so do not get your hope up 😅
TL;DR
These lexis diagrams display the male-female mortality ratio from 1900-2023, highlighting trends in excess mortality. Blue is excess male and red is excess female mortality. The graphs show the ratio, not the absolute numbers
Interesting that for The Netherlands the excess mortality at the end of the war extends to a much older age compared to the beginning of the war - and compared to other countries. Would this be the effect of the famine (hongerwinter) we're seeing?
Thanks for your comment! I am not sure exactly what it could be, but why would this so strongly impact males? Maybe because they were already weakened by the war/resistance?
Maybe also the Dutch resistance and fighting in the netherlands increased in 1944/45 (e.g, operation market garden), which might play a role? But you are right that you can't fully explain the higher death rates in older ages. I will look it up. Maybe I will find an explanation!
Is this normalized to how many women and men even exist? Since there is more men than women beeing born and its like a few percent so it might be significant for this figure.
Btw its looks great!
Thank you for your comment! I am not 100% sure I understand your question completely, but since the age-specific death rates for the sexes are calculated by females, that died at age x / females alive at age x, I think it should take care of such effects. Surprisingly sex ratio at birth is not stable over time. There is even such a thing as the "returning soldier effect" but I am not sure if that really holds, but it is interesting to look into.
ok so its should be normalized then. So for any point in the plot the equation is: (females, that died at age x / females alive at age x) / (males, that died at age x / males alive at age x) ?
or the other way round it doesnt matter
It must not be.
In recent decades these graphs show surplus male deaths at every age 20 to 100. So either a **whole lot** of women live past 100, or there's just more men overall.
Even knowing that it's not even (51% of babies are boys) I'm amazed that slight advantage could show up so glaringly here. I really expected to see surplus female deaths in the 80+ range because the men tend to die earlier.
Remember, you're dividing the number of deaths by the number of living people of that sex of the same age, so although the vast majority of the deaths at very old age are women, more men are still dying as a *percentage of their population* than women are of their population.
Hi, thanks for your question. As I discussed in some other comments, most research points to excess male smoking rates. These were men who started smoking very heavily between/during the wars, and since it was not socially acceptable in many countries for women to smoke, it very heavily impacts men. There might be other reasons, but this is the most common explanation.
In denmark, for example, this effect is less pronounced and not because males smoked less but more that danish women started smoking a lot earlier. They essentially adopted the unhealthy behaviour of men.
Are most women in modern age living past 100? Not counting small children, male mortality seems to dominate to around 80 and after that it gets more equal, but there is no age in graph where more women die. As there is around equal number of men and women, I would assume more women should die at some age
My understanding is it doesn’t rely on absolute numbers. So if there are 100 100-year old men and 100 100-year old women, how many of those men will die compared to the women? If 40% of men at that age die and 30% of women at that age die, you’ll have excess male mortality, even if there are more women at that age overall (because it really means a man at that age is X% more likely to die before their next birthday than a woman at that age)
OP said in another comment the graph shows the ratio, not the numbers, so just because two pixels are dark blue doesn't make them the same number of deaths
Yes, thanks, I get that. Still, the relative figures are dramatic: if, e.g., during wars the ratio is 2000:1000 and during afterwars the ratio is 200:100.
Yeah, I imagine the world wars are actually *much* higher than a 2:1 ratio but they get washed out by the limited scale. Being a 40 year old man in 1960 is nowhere near as deadly as being a 20 year old man in 1944.
Thank you for your comment. I'm sorry that I replied only now, your comment slipped through. But I agree with the others that one distorting fact might be the limited scale. It was quite hard to find a scale that would work for across multiple countries, some of which were not (or less) affected by the wars. The "raw" numbers for France and England&Wales, for example, in 1940 are staggeringly high. The second world war was a lot worse for sure. Maybe I will remake some of the graphs for individual countries with a more detailed scale!
Thanks! Yes, finding the right scale is a challenge. Perhaps you can leave the ">" and "<" bands exclusively for wars? So the threshold is not 100%, but whatever the highest "peace time" value is.
Hey I just made a new post playing around with a new scale. Not really sure I made better or worse but maybe you still like it. I also added some new countries that were suggested in other comments.
Love the graph but I don't understand how France and Finland for one can continue to have a mortality rate so much higher for men... Of all ages. That doesn't make sense. Or is that because it is always just more likely that a man will die than a woman in percentage? I would have expected it to be in the numbers of deaths for each gender.
Really great charts. Wonder though if you can exclude the noise where there’s insufficient data - like statistically insignificant points. (Very old historically and very young these days) Could clean them up a bit.
Thanks for your comment! I agree it could get a bit tidier, especially in the younger ages. But I thought, especially the historic data is really fascinating. Swedish data actually goes back into the 18th century but there the quality is questionable.
Hi, thanks for your question. Yes, I think it might be that or also high rates of alcohol consumption and smoking. Furthermore, logging/forestry is a very important industry in Finalnd with high death rates among workers that are mostly male. But I doubt that it can explain everything. Maybe some people with more knowledge on finish history can help!
> Furthermore, logging/forestry is a very important industry in Finalnd with high death rates among workers that are mostly male.
This is an important missing piece i guess, because it's the only country where the dark blue pattern spreads quite evenly across age groups and the years, compared to the other countries.
Hi, thanks for your question! This is not a stupid question at all. The database I used simply did not have any data for those years. I don't know why exactly it could be that data collection started later, or maybe the quality was not sufficient in those years to be included in the early years. I still included it since I thought it was an interesting case. Maybe I should have indicated that this data is missing.
Thank you so much for your kind comment! I just really like how cool this data looks. And As I mentioned in the text and as a not in the plot, I am certainly not the first one to come up with this idea! So, not all credit should go to me
Fascinating! I love how you can track the fortunes of a whole year-birth cohort by following the diagonal lines up and to the right.
For England and Wales you can see how the men of 1900 just missed the ravages of WWI (assuming they didn't lie about their age) and WWII before payback (smoking?) kicks in in 1955.
For the 1980-85 male English/Welsh cohort theirs a weird, brief drop in excess mortality from 2010-15. Wasn't sure if that was a smoking ban thing (only in 2007, so probably not enough time), longer pub opening hours from 2007 reducing violence, or the financial crash resulting in less money to do stupid stuff?
What does `>100% male mortality` mean? There's several pixels of that to be found in the 2010s for ages below 20 (in the colorful pixel soup).
For example in Finland at 2012 there's a dark blue pixel at age 10. So that means that in 2012 not a single 10 year old girl died in Finland? Or what?
It's the rate of death, compared male to female. Not the percentage of the population that died.
if 1 in 1,000,000 women died, and 2 in 1,000,000 men died, then the ratio is 100% higher for men.
Thanks for your feedback! I agree the limited scale is a bit misleading and if one checks the "raw" numbers one can see that especially in France/Italy it is a lot higher. I chose this scale since I wanted to have something comparable across multiple countries and a longer scale range really messes with countries that were not or less effected by the war. I might update some individual countries with different scale, I am sure it will be very insightful!
Makes me curious why Finland is the only one with high excess female mortality of 90 year olds during WW2?
edit:
On 2nd glance what's even more remarkable about that anomaly is that it started a few years earlier than WW2, around 1933, and that its "wave" follows the age.
Makes it look like something affected women 85 years (+/- just a few years) in a one time event and then killed them over the next few years
How come all these graphs look so male dominated in basically all time ranges?
You'd expect with so many men dying at younger age that the older age band would be female dominated since they're the ones left to die at that age but it looks like it's barely the case and the neutral/female dominated band is super small.
Excellent work! Super-interesting. Starting with \~1950s there are probably 2 things going on:
* 20-yo women stopped dying in childbirth, so everybody can now see how risk-taking behavior of young men is killing them off.
* something changed in the behavior of middle-aged men
I am really curious about the middle-aged men - I don't think it's drinking, as men drank a ton since dawn of history:
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-alcohol-1890](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-alcohol-1890)
Tobacco is probably a more significant factor: [https://thoracickey.com/the-tobacco-epidemic/](https://thoracickey.com/the-tobacco-epidemic/)
However, excessive deaths from lung cancer are lagging behind peak tobacco consumption by \~20-30 years: [https://ourworldindata.org/how-do-researchers-estimate-the-death-toll-caused-by-each-risk-factor-whether-its-smoking-obesity-or-air-pollution](https://ourworldindata.org/how-do-researchers-estimate-the-death-toll-caused-by-each-risk-factor-whether-its-smoking-obesity-or-air-pollution)
In some European countries like Italy peak is relatively recent (e.g., 90's) and per capita cigarette consumption is still pretty high, so excessive mortality from lung cancer should have just happened or happening now.
To me these lifestyle explanations being the main contributors sounds a bit shaky, I think there is more going on. For example, the societal expectation of men being breadwinners and the concept of stay-at-home moms is relatively recent and probably its' rise and fall roughly coincides with a period of 1930 - 2010 - so I wonder whether exposing men to more chronic stress and occupational hazards is a significant factor. Another explanation might be the nature of work: companies got bigger, hierarchies longer, so men, being hierarchical, got more stressed out from just being in the workforce. Might also be that something changed in the behavior of women.
EDIT: Forgot one: shift from agricultural economy and urbanization. Men are worse at finding friends then women, and loneliness kills. Men that grew up in villages never learned to make friends in the first place - they just grew up with them. The younger generations are city dwellers and are probably better adjusted to the atomized society.
This made me chuckle! Not exactly, I guess. Maybe there were also more "deadly" opportunities to behave stupid (e.g., traffic accidents). Also, I think that at the same time, maternal deaths decreased quite a lot, making male death rates stand out even more.
I would have actually expected the opposite as work related death drop significantly over the last 100 years, where mostly man would die from. In construction, or in a mine, etc.
I assume that is sarcasm😅! But yes actually if you look at Denmark you see a lot lower excess male deaths in higher ages and that is mostly because women in Denmark started smoking a lot earlier than in other countries due to earlier progress in gender equality. So essentially, danish women adopted the unhealthy behaviour of danish men. It is so strong that you can actually detect it in graphs of danish life expectancy in the 70s and 80s, especially when comparing Denmark to other Nordic countries.
But yeah, increasing female mortality rates is not really a suitable public health goal 😅
Hi, I agree Russia and Germany would be fascinating to look into. Unfortunately, the database I used does not have this detailed data for those counties for such a long time period. Germany, for example, only starts in 1950. Also, it can get quite tricky with the separation between East and West Germany. But historically, it is certainly some of the most interesting cases!
I think it's interesting to see how well-defined the 'cloud' of male mortality between the ages of 60-80 and starting around 1960 is. Is this just due to having more data and/or greater data granularity in some countries versus others?
Also, what causes this phenomenon? Decreasing amounts of deaths or complications during childbirths due to medical advances around that time?
Hi, thanks for your question. As I mention in some other comments, most research points to excess male smoking rates. These were men who started smoking very heavily between/during the wars, and since it was not socially acceptable in many countries for women to smoke, it very heavily impacts men. There might be other reasons, but this is the most common explanation.
In denmark, for example, this effect is less pronounced and not because males smoked less but more that danish women started smoking a lot earlier.
Hi, thanks for your question, I think here it is actually that the German invasion was over so quickly and there was very little fighting. According to Wikipedia, only 16 danish soldiers died, and across the whole period, only 3000 Danes died. I did not double-check these numbers, but it makes sense and explains why we cannot see any lines here.
Finnish civil war reaching far older men than most wars. Spanish civil war lines are tall too.
The visualization gets a bit noisy when there is little data, like the very old in old times and children is current times.
Thanks for your comment! I agree, maybe because they are civil wars and therefore more "messy"? I don't really know, but there is certainly organized conscription, I assume. I agree it gets a bit messy in some cases, especially in small countries. The trends also look smoother overall in bigger countries!
What do you think changed in about the 1950s where it looks like all countries had excess male mortality at most ages?
Has life become more dangerous for men or has life become safer for women?
This appears to be a totally new trend outside of wars and doesn’t seem county dependent.
Why is the very bottom line representing age 0 blue across the entire X axis for all 9 countries?
Also, kind of interesting how you can see France's excess male mortality is higher for 1940 and 1944 than the years in between, same for the Netherlands.
I wonder if baby boys are more exposed to the risk of fatal genetic disorders linked to the X chromosome, since they only have 1 chance to get a functional copy of anything on that gene
This is fantastic. What this sub is made for.
Two in one day - just after I’ve seen the best PBI dashboard yet. Sweet.
I can’t help but wonder what Germany looks like, what with all those other big bands of blue
Am I correct in assuming the strong random spikes in teenage mortality rates in the last few years are due to a (hopefully) small sample sizes for these groups?
Could you be a little more detailed about the quantity being plotted? You describe it as male deaths divided by female deaths but that wouldn't produce a range in percentages. A year of zero female deaths would yield a ratio of infinity. Sorry to be pedantic but it's only because the plots are eerily fascinating!
This is one of the best posts I’ve seen on this sub. This is really cool/interesting, and a really cool way of presenting the data.
Thank you very much for your kind comment! I think the data just looks very cool like this. I actually want to use the graphs in teaching, hopefully the students will also like it.
Could you change 'deaths of despair' to suicide? It sounds poetic but suicide should have more prominence as a big factor in male death. Yes it's refreshing to see an actualy 'dataisbeaitful' graph. Also I have never seen this type of mortality graphs before, but they are very insightful. You can also see prominently that the mortality in men rises suddenly around 20.
Hi, thank you for your kind comment and feedback! I totally agree that male suicides deserve more attention. It is shocking to see how high the numbers are. I use the term deaths of despair since it is widely used in demography as it also includes drug overdoses and sometimes alcoholic liver diseases. I think historically, these causes of deaths were often not clearly distinguished, and therefore, this broader category is used. I guess it can also be quite challenging in some cases to establish the exact cause of death. Maybe someone with a background in medicine or epidemiology knows more about this classification! But yes, I think for more modern data, it is outdated and should probably be changed.
oh i didnt know thanks
I think the causes are often distinguished but the point around deaths from alcoholism, overdosing other drugs, and suicide is that there's much higher incidence found in deprived areas - hence considering together in this way. Agree that the term sounds quite antiquated, which probably reflects how this is a problem that has existed for a long time.
Absolutely, this is something new
What's up with the bands of excess female mortality between 17-20 before 1930? Losses from childbirth?
Hi, thanks for your comment! I was thinking the same thing. Maybe at that time, maternal deaths were so high that they countered the higher risks of accidents for males in that age group, but once there were improvements in maternal health that disappeared. But I am not sure if it makes sense in all countries (e.g. Italy). Maybe someone who knows more about public health can tell us more!
IIRC, Pre modern medicine (prevalence of germ theory - late 1800s, 1940s - Penicillin? unsure of "modern" maternal care history), maternal mortality ran around 10%. So that would track.
Pretty sure Penicillin wasn't widely adopted till post WW2, but also pretty sure that germ theory and hence importance of cleanliness was well understood by the 1930s.
It probably has something more to do with sanitation in medical facilities.
It seems young for maternal deaths... That looks like 14-16, which in those nations in that time period seems young (though the way the graph displays that????) The "red cloud" even extends to younger ages, which makes less sense. I'd expect that line to be closer to 20 years old for those nations.
It could be just that.... These are teenage pregnancies. Teens 15-17 just don't die at a high rate. They they tend to be healthy, by virtue of diseases having killed off the vulnerable already, and not yet involved in dangerous activity. In the US today, the top two causes car accidents and drowning. So cross off car accidents before 1930... and there probably wasn't as much recreational swimming. In other words, even if 15 is an unusually early age to get pregnant, it's also a dangerous age, and even a few deaths at this age is going to show up in the data.
Not sure where you got your data, but top causes of death at least in this article linked from data in 2013-2016 echoes usual numbers of adolescent deaths: MVA, suicide, homicide. Old days what we used to learn was: Accident, then homicide, then suicide. There definitely is not that many folks dying of drowning (as you can tell from the link). [https://www.ajc.com/news/national/what-killing-america-teens-inside-cdc-new-mortality-report/OeNlRXFCJqxZz5H7LsL5zJ/](https://www.ajc.com/news/national/what-killing-america-teens-inside-cdc-new-mortality-report/OeNlRXFCJqxZz5H7LsL5zJ/)
I am afraid the explanation of “teen pregnancies” (and the clump in some countries drop to disturbingly low ages) may be very grim. These extremely young pregnancies I suspect are the least wanted pregnancies. Least wanted by the: pregnant female, biological father, and parents and family of the impregnated and impregnator. Could it be increases in murder and suicide? A few studies showed the leading cause of death amongst US pregnant women in the last 20 years has been homicide. [link](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8020563/). Maybe combined with teen pregnancies are riskier than for women in their 20’s? [link](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC411126/)
Hi, I was just thanking you for the comment on thanking ops comment
Hello, just thanking your thanks for thanking. Thanks
If these plots are based on the ratios of the male vs female deaths, then how is it that along a diagonal line (a cohort) we don’t see a nearly even amount of blue and red? Is it perhaps that the colors aren’t based on the NUMBER of deaths, but instead based on the fraction of people available to be counted in that gender / cohort who were available to die? This would mean that if we started out with even numbers of males and females and half of the cohort of males died in a war, then the expected gender-neutral death ratio after would be females 2:1 ?
Explain like I’m 5
I think that what u/Objective_Economy281 is saying is (and sorry if I got it wrong), that if we see men die more frequently at younger ages, then we should expect to see more women than men dying at older ages. There should be an inversion of color, with a certain age at which it's 50/50. If we don't see it, then probably the graph doesn't represent male\_deaths / female deaths, but rather (male\_deaths / males\_alive\_at\_age) / (female\_deaths / females\_alive\_at\_age). Hope I got it right; if so, I concur. It also makes sense considering OP's text "calculated by dividing male death rates by female death rates".
That’s exactly what I was saying. A ratio of ratios doesn’t really lend itself to ELI5-ing
I agree that dying during childbirth is a big factor for young first time mothers, but I think a large factor for those women is also failed abortions leading to deaths. For young women who became pregnant with fathers that would not marry them, shady abortion practices would have been more prevalent than today.
If child birth was the risk factor, then the excess female deaths shouldn't show up as a band around 17-20 years. Women give birth after that age, too. Unless the first child carries significantly higher risks,
It does, younger women are more likely to die in childbirth too
WHO stats on childbirth risk backs up that childbearing before the age of 20 comes with significant risks of birth injury and death [https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-pregnancy](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-pregnancy) >Adolescent mothers (aged 10–19 years) face higher risks of eclampsia, puerperal endometritis and systemic infections than women aged 20–24 years
For many of the countries you can see excess female deaths in the 25-40 range as well. There are a couple of reasons I can think of for this pattern. One is that teenage pregnancies were more likely to end in death because the body is not yet fully developed. Another is that even though deaths in childbirth were still common for women in their twenties, excess male deaths were even more common at that age because of young men entering dangerous professions and engaging in risky activities upon leaving home.
Highest risk don't get a second pregnancy
IIRC it’s U-shaped. High in the first pregnancy, the lowers, the rise up again after at fifth.
Yes because pregnancy and birth are dangerous for teen and 40-something mothers.
Your reasoning is wrong. Teenage pregnancies and first births don't need to be riskier than later births. They just need to be riskier than what teenage men are doing and less risky than what adult men are doing.
From a [CDC report](https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm): >Maternal mortality rates were highest in this century during 1900-1930. Poor obstetric education and delivery practices were mainly responsible for the high numbers of maternal deaths, most of which were preventable. Obstetrics as a speciality was shunned by many physicians, and obstetric care was provided by poorly trained or untrained medical practitioners. Most births occurred at home with the assistance of midwives or general practitioners. Inappropriate and excessive surgical and obstetric interventions (e.g., induction of labor, use of forceps, episiotomy, and cesarean deliveries) were common and increased during the 1920s. Deliveries, including some surgical interventions, were performed without following the principles of asepsis. As a result, 40% of maternal deaths were caused by sepsis (half following delivery and half associated with illegally induced abortion) with the remaining deaths primarily attributed to hemorrhage and toxemia. >The 1933 White House Conference on Child Health Protection, Fetal, Newborn, and Maternal Mortality and Morbidity report demonstrated the link between poor aseptic practice, excessive operative deliveries, and high maternal mortality. This and earlier reports focused attention on the state of maternal health and led to calls for action by state medical associations. During the 1930s-1940s, hospital and state maternal mortality review committees were established. During the ensuing years, institutional practice guidelines and guidelines defining physician qualifications needed for hospital delivery privileges were developed. At the same time, a shift from home to hospital deliveries was occurring throughout the country; during 1938-1948, the proportion of infants born in hospitals increased from 55% to 90%. That, the first birth being the most dangerous, and young mothers being most at-risk, seem to account for those awful horizontal blobs. (I recognize the graphs don't cover the US, but am guessing the trend was widespread as medical innovations would've impacted all these countries roughly equally.)
Holy shit, 20% of deaths were from botched abortions? Am I reading that right?
Pretty much all big improvements in reducing mortality rate during birth for mothers, that affects younger women more often, became subsequently broadly available after WW1. Blood transfusions, Caesarean section, antibiotics, anesthesia advances, surgical suture, the principles of asepsis. Sadly i can't find a detailed statistic for that time other than that the high mortality rate has been almost eliminated between 1890 and 1980 in the first world.
IIRC this is about the time doctors started widely adopting the practice of washing their hands between handling patients with infectious disease and delivering babies. Ignaz Semmelweis is today credited with the discovery that this reduces infant and mother mortality by a substantial margin. He made this discovery in the mid-1800s but was largely discredited and ignored because of ignorance and stubbornness by the medical community at large. It was only after many more trials and a world war in which far too many men lost their lives to poor medical hygeine that the process was adopted more widely. Had he been listened to from the beginning, tens or even hundreds of thousands of women could have been saved from death during birth. In any case, the adoption of this and other aseptic processes and the corresponding decrease in the rate of maternal death during childbirth are probably responsible for the trend displayed here.
I'd guess it's a combo of bacterial and viral infections, like tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, and syphilis, as well as childbirth.
This is fantastic. You can see wars, maternal health advances, and the rise and fall of the Mad Men lifestyle on the same graph. Also, it's handy how you can follow the diagonal grid lines from a point on the plot to find the birth year on the x-axis. ETA: and all those young male deaths post 1950 has to be car crashes, right?
Thank you for your kind comment and feedback! I agree that lexis diagrams are very insightful to spot trends. And yes, I think a large chunk of male deaths are traffic accidents (also motorcycles) but also more risky occupations, alcohol and deaths of despair. All of which strongly impact young males. But for that one, one actually needs to plot cause of deaths, and that data is a bit harder to get.
I think it's a neat visualization, but I am puzzled by one thing I hope you can help explain: if we assume that by age ~100 pretty much everyone is dead and that roughly even numbers of men and women are born each year, I'd assume that any male excess mortality should be followed by a female excess mortality at some point (since there are fewer males left, so more females will die in comparison to the males). As such, does it compare each year to all people alive at the start of the year instead of all people born from the same year?
I have no idea, but could it be that: Year 80 there’s 100 men and women left Year 81 20/15 die: 20% men, 15% women, 80 and 85 left Year 82 15/15 die: 19% men, 18% women, 65 and 70 left Year 83 10/11 die: 15,3% men, 14,8% women, 55 and 59 left So more women are dying in total, but there’s less men to begin with, so a bigger share of men have died? Idk, I’m tired, so my example might not make sense
I can only agree. Fascinating visualization! Really!
I'm really struck by the sudden post-war region of late-age male deaths that started in the 1950's and largely ended in the 1990's except in France and Finland where it is taking much longer. I wonder what contributed to the rise and fall of the phenomenon. Consequence of wartime stress on the survivors? Also intriguing is the high-intensity static among the population of the young starting in the 80's, where there are extreme swings between boys and girls between both year and age.
Yeah I interpreted the big swings in the gender mortality ratio among young kids as evidence that fewer young kids are dying. I'm not a statistician, but maybe the mean number of deaths for each age/sex cohort is going down, but the standard deviation isn't going down as much. That would explain relatively large swings from year to year between the sexes.
I am not sure at all so take it with a grain of salt but I think tobacco & alcohol consumption would be major factors. Smoking in France in particular was highly prevalent among males and has declined a lot (or is even equalizing between genders).
I wonder whether it's smoking. In some countries, it's concentrated on the cohorts that served in the Second World War (and were often supplied with cigarettes in their rations), while other countries it lasts longer. I'd be very interested to know whether the difference correlates with smoking rates.
Yes I was wondering about that same post war middle aged men peak, you mention and it's relationship to the war. Fascinating data.
Yeah, the diagonal grid lines are really helpful. On graphs with a piece missing from the "mad men" blob, you can trace the diagonal and see that it overlaps with more war deaths.
Car crashes and other deaths by misadventure. https://youtu.be/AuOB0hVOOXM?si=OXqhFT4bayKuMVYU
Fascinating way to present the data. I would be curious to see how North America would look given almost no civilian deaths in the world wars.
Thank you for the comment! Yes, that is a good idea, I have checked, and there is data on the US and Canada, so maybe I will do a follow-up post! In theory, the male excess death should be much higher in the world wars. Maybe one would even need to extend the scale.
Thanks. I hope t9 see it if you do.
I just made a post with data from the US and Canada and some other countries!
Oh please do, I would absolutely love to see this data
I made a new post with data from the US and Canada and some other countries. Unfortunately their data does not go back si for but maybe you still like it!
Yes, please.
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Thank you. This is a very straightforward observation I never thought about, but yes, I think that is probably true since more women survive into old age.
I would even assume that it’s what you can see in your plots, as most graphs have a band of red at the top >90! I noticed this immediately :) I guess at older ages, more women die because there are more women still alive at these ages…? Or how would it work in the context of how you define the ratios? Is it a ratio compared to how many M:F existed at their birth year, or is it moving ie with how many others are alive at that age in that point of time?
It does seem odd that all these are predominantly blue until very old age. You'd think that big predominance of male deaths would lead to later excess of female deaths. Nonagenarians is a very small population in any case.
Yea, I’m not understanding why pink is so rare to find in the graph. It doesn’t need to be 50/50 but it doesn’t seem mathematically possible that almost always at a given age that more men are dying Edit: looking at the chart, maybe the women just haven’t died yet? Would still expect to see the pink make a bigger comeback for birth years 1910-1930
Remember, this is comparing *rates* to *rates.* Most very old deaths are women, but that's being divided by the total population of very old people, which is also overwhelmingly women. Put another way, men of all ages are more likely to die than women of the same age; there's nothing inconsistent about that, as the rates don't need to balance overall.
This is true everywhere. Go to a retirement home and notice that 80% of people are women.
There are ‘striations’ running diagonally up to the right, particularly for Spain, is this a normalization artefact or something real? Also, most countries show a cluster of excess female deaths at very high ages, but not all!
Thanks for your comment! I actually don't know what is going on in Spain, but it looks artificial, maybe some data quality/collection issues. I can look into it! I think the high mortality ratios for females in high ages could be because so few males survive into old age, meaning that those who are left are maybe very resilient? So it is a selection bias by health, but I'm not sure. Maybe someone in the comments knows more.
The diagonal stripes could imply health care practices adapted for age groups during some years? E.g. if some vaccinations would affect female/male mortality more, like the one against HPV that reduces risk of uterine cancer.
The diagonals in Spain could be due to kids not knowing their age that was just given a round number for birthdate. Like "you were born around 1880 but don't know the exact date? Well, 1880 it is". That create more people from those year. If we assume that previous to 1900 more women were dying young, than means a lot of women that had this "feature" were already dead and now we see the man with this feature dying.
These are incredible. Quite a few countries exhibit a concentration of excess male deaths for 60 year olds around 1970. Is there a canonical explanation for this feature? These would be men who’d have fought through WW2, survived, and then succumbed 30 years later. And on that note, do you have the data for Germany?
Thank you for your kind comment! Yes, I briefly mention it in the description, and it is also discussed in the paper, which inspired the graphs. The most common explanation are very high smoking rates among males in that cohort. Smoking rates in most European countries were a lot higher back then, and it was socially not acceptable for women to smoke. This changed first in Denmark, which is why excess male deaths are lower since danish women started smoking very heavily. But there might be other reasons! Negative health effects from surviving World War 2 could also play a role. Data for Germany exists but only in high quality since the 1950s , and it can get a bit tricky with the separation between West and East Germany. That's why I usually don't work with German data when it comes to more fun graphs and long historic comparisons. Historically, Germany is probably one of the most fascinating cases.
If those huge blue blobs between 60 and 80 years between the 70’s and roughly 2000 are due to smoking, the cigarette industry body count is just stupendous. Years post ww2 one would expect death ratio in the older (> 60) population to skew in the direction of females, because more of them survived? Really interesting graphics. Thnx.
Yeah, I agree. Some demographers actually refer to it as the "smoking epidemic" because it has such a strong impact on mortality. But if course this is only one factor (yet a very strong one). A cool comparison would be with countries that always smoked less or decreased total smoking rates a lot quicker. I'm not sure, but I think sweden smokes a lot less today, but I don't know how it was historically.
Thanks for the detailed answer, and sorry I missed it in your initial post text. “Smoking”. Obvious when it’s pointed out. A different question for you: have you tried making further colour bins for the “> 100%” male excess deaths category. I feel like the two world wars would have excess male deaths far beyond 100%.
Hi, yes, I have done that for some individual countries, but then it really messes up things in countries that were not or less impacted by the wars. And since I want to use them for teaching, I thought that having the same scale is more important. I tried to make a scale that was comparable across multiple countries, but maybe I should have extended it further. But you are totally right. The numbers for France in 1940, for example, are staggeringly high! Maybe I will make a follow-up post for some of the countries. Thank you!
Hey I just made a post with the available data for East and West Germany. It is not the best but maybe you find it interesting!
Are relevent data collected for individual Länder in Germany that would allow the longer comparison?
And what about young males after 1950s death rate. It can not be smoking. They are too young.
This is one of the most interesting, well-designed, and comprehensively documented visualisations I've ever seen on this sub. The quality of submissions on /r/dataisbeautiful is awful, and I don't understand why the moderators aren't doing their jobs, but it's rare gems like this that keep me subscribed. Would I be right to guess that you work with data professionally?
Thank you very much for your kind comment! Yes I do research and also teach quantitative methods. I also want to use these graphs for teaching and this was a bit of a trial whether they are understandable.
You can really see the risk-seeking behavior of men kick in around 18 or 19 everywhere.
Thanks for your comment! You really can! I guess it is a combination of risky behaviour (e.g, driving motorcycles), alcohol and higher risks of workplace accidents. It is crazy that you can see across all of the countries that strongly!
0-5 should honestly be a graph to itself.
Men are also more likely to go into more dangerous fields of work: armed forces, linemen, lumberjacks, pizza delivery drivers, etc.
But also see how dangerous childbirth was before then to overshadow the "hold my beer" instinct of young men.
Strange, I assumed it was workplace accidents
Yes. Also when they can start driving, or start working. I wonder what the most significant factor is.
Agree but the england and wales one looks too sharp, like at 16 something changes in how the data is collected/reported
In England and Wales the school leaving age was raised in stages from 14 to 18, with 16 being the age from the mid-1970s to the 2000s. You can see both the threshold and the changes in the chart, though the changes don't exactly match the years when the law changed, perhaps because the law lagged common practice.
What's going on with people 5-10? That cohort started with excess female mortality, switched to excess male mortality by the 50's, and maybe now is a mess (small sample size issues?) I wouldn't think maternal health changes would make much of a difference for 5 year olds.
Thank you for the comment. That is a very good question, indeed. I do not actually know, but yeah, maybe it has to do with small sample sizes? Also, I think the excess mortality is over really string in that agreement group, so maybe it might be explained by some diseases that slightly impact girls aged 5-10 more? Or maybe child labour in factories? Really not sure. Maybe someone in the comments who knows more about epidemiology or public health can help out
I noticed the same thing and was wondering if cultural preferences for boys ('heirs') around 1900 could have led parents to dedicate more resources (milk, food, medicine, $$) to ensuring their sons survived infancy/childhood? Just a theory, would love to hear from anyone who has thoughts/data on that
Just the fact you can see when the world wars were is crazy.
Thanks for your comment! I totally agree, and in other countries, you can see other conflicts like the Spanish Civil War or even the finish civil war (only 1918). And I think that in the Netherlands and France you can even see the phases of the second world war. At least, that is my speculation, but I might also be delayed data collection.
It would make sense for war deaths in those countries to be clustered in 1939-40 and 1944-45, since that’s when the major battles were taking place.
I think that you can see the Finnish civil war in 1918 aswell.
What happened in about 1940 where the tendency for more girls than boys 0-15 to die went completely away?
Thanks for your comment. It's a really good question. I speculated in some other comments about it, but I really do not know. I will investigate and if you find something I will come back to you. Unfortunately, I do not have a clue about historic child mortality, so do not get your hope up 😅
TL;DR These lexis diagrams display the male-female mortality ratio from 1900-2023, highlighting trends in excess mortality. Blue is excess male and red is excess female mortality. The graphs show the ratio, not the absolute numbers
Interesting that for The Netherlands the excess mortality at the end of the war extends to a much older age compared to the beginning of the war - and compared to other countries. Would this be the effect of the famine (hongerwinter) we're seeing?
Thanks for your comment! I am not sure exactly what it could be, but why would this so strongly impact males? Maybe because they were already weakened by the war/resistance? Maybe also the Dutch resistance and fighting in the netherlands increased in 1944/45 (e.g, operation market garden), which might play a role? But you are right that you can't fully explain the higher death rates in older ages. I will look it up. Maybe I will find an explanation!
This is absolutely fucking fascinating
Is this normalized to how many women and men even exist? Since there is more men than women beeing born and its like a few percent so it might be significant for this figure. Btw its looks great!
Thank you for your comment! I am not 100% sure I understand your question completely, but since the age-specific death rates for the sexes are calculated by females, that died at age x / females alive at age x, I think it should take care of such effects. Surprisingly sex ratio at birth is not stable over time. There is even such a thing as the "returning soldier effect" but I am not sure if that really holds, but it is interesting to look into.
ok so its should be normalized then. So for any point in the plot the equation is: (females, that died at age x / females alive at age x) / (males, that died at age x / males alive at age x) ? or the other way round it doesnt matter
Yes, you are right. That is exactly how it is calculated!
It must not be. In recent decades these graphs show surplus male deaths at every age 20 to 100. So either a **whole lot** of women live past 100, or there's just more men overall. Even knowing that it's not even (51% of babies are boys) I'm amazed that slight advantage could show up so glaringly here. I really expected to see surplus female deaths in the 80+ range because the men tend to die earlier.
Remember, you're dividing the number of deaths by the number of living people of that sex of the same age, so although the vast majority of the deaths at very old age are women, more men are still dying as a *percentage of their population* than women are of their population.
What with that blob peaking in the 80s for male mortality?
Hi, thanks for your question. As I discussed in some other comments, most research points to excess male smoking rates. These were men who started smoking very heavily between/during the wars, and since it was not socially acceptable in many countries for women to smoke, it very heavily impacts men. There might be other reasons, but this is the most common explanation. In denmark, for example, this effect is less pronounced and not because males smoked less but more that danish women started smoking a lot earlier. They essentially adopted the unhealthy behaviour of men.
I have to think cars (and motorcycles) played a part here. Smoking isn’t terribly likely to kill a 22 year old.
Are most women in modern age living past 100? Not counting small children, male mortality seems to dominate to around 80 and after that it gets more equal, but there is no age in graph where more women die. As there is around equal number of men and women, I would assume more women should die at some age
My understanding is it doesn’t rely on absolute numbers. So if there are 100 100-year old men and 100 100-year old women, how many of those men will die compared to the women? If 40% of men at that age die and 30% of women at that age die, you’ll have excess male mortality, even if there are more women at that age overall (because it really means a man at that age is X% more likely to die before their next birthday than a woman at that age)
so the second half of the 20th century has the same effect on men as each world war?
OP said in another comment the graph shows the ratio, not the numbers, so just because two pixels are dark blue doesn't make them the same number of deaths
Yes, thanks, I get that. Still, the relative figures are dramatic: if, e.g., during wars the ratio is 2000:1000 and during afterwars the ratio is 200:100.
I think the "worst" band is still 100%+. So if the deaths are 7:1 and then 2:1 they get the same colour
Yeah, I imagine the world wars are actually *much* higher than a 2:1 ratio but they get washed out by the limited scale. Being a 40 year old man in 1960 is nowhere near as deadly as being a 20 year old man in 1944.
That's a good point!
Thank you for your comment. I'm sorry that I replied only now, your comment slipped through. But I agree with the others that one distorting fact might be the limited scale. It was quite hard to find a scale that would work for across multiple countries, some of which were not (or less) affected by the wars. The "raw" numbers for France and England&Wales, for example, in 1940 are staggeringly high. The second world war was a lot worse for sure. Maybe I will remake some of the graphs for individual countries with a more detailed scale!
Thanks! Yes, finding the right scale is a challenge. Perhaps you can leave the ">" and "<" bands exclusively for wars? So the threshold is not 100%, but whatever the highest "peace time" value is.
Hey I just made a new post playing around with a new scale. Not really sure I made better or worse but maybe you still like it. I also added some new countries that were suggested in other comments.
Love the graph but I don't understand how France and Finland for one can continue to have a mortality rate so much higher for men... Of all ages. That doesn't make sense. Or is that because it is always just more likely that a man will die than a woman in percentage? I would have expected it to be in the numbers of deaths for each gender.
Super cool chart, great work
Thank you!
Really great charts. Wonder though if you can exclude the noise where there’s insufficient data - like statistically insignificant points. (Very old historically and very young these days) Could clean them up a bit.
Thanks for your comment! I agree it could get a bit tidier, especially in the younger ages. But I thought, especially the historic data is really fascinating. Swedish data actually goes back into the 18th century but there the quality is questionable.
Why are their so many male deaths in Finland post WW2? Suicide?
Hi, thanks for your question. Yes, I think it might be that or also high rates of alcohol consumption and smoking. Furthermore, logging/forestry is a very important industry in Finalnd with high death rates among workers that are mostly male. But I doubt that it can explain everything. Maybe some people with more knowledge on finish history can help!
> Furthermore, logging/forestry is a very important industry in Finalnd with high death rates among workers that are mostly male. This is an important missing piece i guess, because it's the only country where the dark blue pattern spreads quite evenly across age groups and the years, compared to the other countries.
Civil war and the Spanish flu
Both of those happened before WW2. You can actually see the effect of the Finnish civil war in this graph. It happened in 1918.
I may be incredibly stupid but is there a reason for the complete lack of data for Spain from around 1900 to 1907?
Hi, thanks for your question! This is not a stupid question at all. The database I used simply did not have any data for those years. I don't know why exactly it could be that data collection started later, or maybe the quality was not sufficient in those years to be included in the early years. I still included it since I thought it was an interesting case. Maybe I should have indicated that this data is missing.
This is one of the best visualizations I've ever seen on this sub, great work! So many interesting trends to pick out, very cool
Thank you so much for your kind comment! I just really like how cool this data looks. And As I mentioned in the text and as a not in the plot, I am certainly not the first one to come up with this idea! So, not all credit should go to me
Fascinating! I love how you can track the fortunes of a whole year-birth cohort by following the diagonal lines up and to the right. For England and Wales you can see how the men of 1900 just missed the ravages of WWI (assuming they didn't lie about their age) and WWII before payback (smoking?) kicks in in 1955. For the 1980-85 male English/Welsh cohort theirs a weird, brief drop in excess mortality from 2010-15. Wasn't sure if that was a smoking ban thing (only in 2007, so probably not enough time), longer pub opening hours from 2007 reducing violence, or the financial crash resulting in less money to do stupid stuff?
What does `>100% male mortality` mean? There's several pixels of that to be found in the 2010s for ages below 20 (in the colorful pixel soup). For example in Finland at 2012 there's a dark blue pixel at age 10. So that means that in 2012 not a single 10 year old girl died in Finland? Or what?
It's the rate of death, compared male to female. Not the percentage of the population that died. if 1 in 1,000,000 women died, and 2 in 1,000,000 men died, then the ratio is 100% higher for men.
Are you able to generate a version with more clarity above +100%? It seems like a poorly chosen cutoff, especially for the France diagram.
Thanks for your feedback! I agree the limited scale is a bit misleading and if one checks the "raw" numbers one can see that especially in France/Italy it is a lot higher. I chose this scale since I wanted to have something comparable across multiple countries and a longer scale range really messes with countries that were not or less effected by the war. I might update some individual countries with different scale, I am sure it will be very insightful!
>Various other factors, such as dietary preferences, also influence these trends. Diet of cigarettes
hahaha I agree a diet of cigarettes is the key here :D
First set of data I've seen on this subreddit that's actually interesting.
Makes me curious why Finland is the only one with high excess female mortality of 90 year olds during WW2? edit: On 2nd glance what's even more remarkable about that anomaly is that it started a few years earlier than WW2, around 1933, and that its "wave" follows the age. Makes it look like something affected women 85 years (+/- just a few years) in a one time event and then killed them over the next few years
Oh my god, it is actually a visualization of “boys will be boys” expression.
How come all these graphs look so male dominated in basically all time ranges? You'd expect with so many men dying at younger age that the older age band would be female dominated since they're the ones left to die at that age but it looks like it's barely the case and the neutral/female dominated band is super small.
Excellent work! Super-interesting. Starting with \~1950s there are probably 2 things going on: * 20-yo women stopped dying in childbirth, so everybody can now see how risk-taking behavior of young men is killing them off. * something changed in the behavior of middle-aged men I am really curious about the middle-aged men - I don't think it's drinking, as men drank a ton since dawn of history: [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-alcohol-1890](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-alcohol-1890) Tobacco is probably a more significant factor: [https://thoracickey.com/the-tobacco-epidemic/](https://thoracickey.com/the-tobacco-epidemic/) However, excessive deaths from lung cancer are lagging behind peak tobacco consumption by \~20-30 years: [https://ourworldindata.org/how-do-researchers-estimate-the-death-toll-caused-by-each-risk-factor-whether-its-smoking-obesity-or-air-pollution](https://ourworldindata.org/how-do-researchers-estimate-the-death-toll-caused-by-each-risk-factor-whether-its-smoking-obesity-or-air-pollution) In some European countries like Italy peak is relatively recent (e.g., 90's) and per capita cigarette consumption is still pretty high, so excessive mortality from lung cancer should have just happened or happening now. To me these lifestyle explanations being the main contributors sounds a bit shaky, I think there is more going on. For example, the societal expectation of men being breadwinners and the concept of stay-at-home moms is relatively recent and probably its' rise and fall roughly coincides with a period of 1930 - 2010 - so I wonder whether exposing men to more chronic stress and occupational hazards is a significant factor. Another explanation might be the nature of work: companies got bigger, hierarchies longer, so men, being hierarchical, got more stressed out from just being in the workforce. Might also be that something changed in the behavior of women. EDIT: Forgot one: shift from agricultural economy and urbanization. Men are worse at finding friends then women, and loneliness kills. Men that grew up in villages never learned to make friends in the first place - they just grew up with them. The younger generations are city dwellers and are probably better adjusted to the atomized society.
Took me a while to read the word "mortality" correctly. I was like, "How tf do they even measure morality?" Lol, but now I get it!
I love this graph. It's interesting how it blends historic events and clinical info all at once.
I love this graph. It's interesting how it blends historic events and clinical info all at once.
So men around the world started to become stupid at around 1950. got it.
This made me chuckle! Not exactly, I guess. Maybe there were also more "deadly" opportunities to behave stupid (e.g., traffic accidents). Also, I think that at the same time, maternal deaths decreased quite a lot, making male death rates stand out even more.
I would have actually expected the opposite as work related death drop significantly over the last 100 years, where mostly man would die from. In construction, or in a mine, etc.
We really need to up the female mortality rate...
I assume that is sarcasm😅! But yes actually if you look at Denmark you see a lot lower excess male deaths in higher ages and that is mostly because women in Denmark started smoking a lot earlier than in other countries due to earlier progress in gender equality. So essentially, danish women adopted the unhealthy behaviour of danish men. It is so strong that you can actually detect it in graphs of danish life expectancy in the 70s and 80s, especially when comparing Denmark to other Nordic countries. But yeah, increasing female mortality rates is not really a suitable public health goal 😅
This looks surprisingly peaceful
Do you have data for Russia and Germany? Great visualization!
Hi, I agree Russia and Germany would be fascinating to look into. Unfortunately, the database I used does not have this detailed data for those counties for such a long time period. Germany, for example, only starts in 1950. Also, it can get quite tricky with the separation between East and West Germany. But historically, it is certainly some of the most interesting cases!
I think it's interesting to see how well-defined the 'cloud' of male mortality between the ages of 60-80 and starting around 1960 is. Is this just due to having more data and/or greater data granularity in some countries versus others? Also, what causes this phenomenon? Decreasing amounts of deaths or complications during childbirths due to medical advances around that time?
I wonder what phenomenon this blue blob in the center is, (year 1970 ish aged 60).
Hi, thanks for your question. As I mention in some other comments, most research points to excess male smoking rates. These were men who started smoking very heavily between/during the wars, and since it was not socially acceptable in many countries for women to smoke, it very heavily impacts men. There might be other reasons, but this is the most common explanation. In denmark, for example, this effect is less pronounced and not because males smoked less but more that danish women started smoking a lot earlier.
ah thanks for your answer!
The bands of mortality due to war seem to cast a shadow of excess male mortality in survivors over the next 50 years
How did Denmark avoid the male war excess deaths? Gender neutral recruitment?
Hi, thanks for your question, I think here it is actually that the German invasion was over so quickly and there was very little fighting. According to Wikipedia, only 16 danish soldiers died, and across the whole period, only 3000 Danes died. I did not double-check these numbers, but it makes sense and explains why we cannot see any lines here.
Finnish civil war reaching far older men than most wars. Spanish civil war lines are tall too. The visualization gets a bit noisy when there is little data, like the very old in old times and children is current times.
Thanks for your comment! I agree, maybe because they are civil wars and therefore more "messy"? I don't really know, but there is certainly organized conscription, I assume. I agree it gets a bit messy in some cases, especially in small countries. The trends also look smoother overall in bigger countries!
Why are so many girls aged 0-20 dying in Europe (Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Netherlands, Switzerland) now?
So the real winners are who avoid death and misery in war - at least if you are a guy and want to find a partner.
What do you think changed in about the 1950s where it looks like all countries had excess male mortality at most ages? Has life become more dangerous for men or has life become safer for women? This appears to be a totally new trend outside of wars and doesn’t seem county dependent.
For younger men, cars.
Tbh I can’t even comprehend what these mean
Why is the very bottom line representing age 0 blue across the entire X axis for all 9 countries? Also, kind of interesting how you can see France's excess male mortality is higher for 1940 and 1944 than the years in between, same for the Netherlands.
I wonder if baby boys are more exposed to the risk of fatal genetic disorders linked to the X chromosome, since they only have 1 chance to get a functional copy of anything on that gene
That sounds extremely plausible but I'm no medical expert.
This is fantastic. What this sub is made for. Two in one day - just after I’ve seen the best PBI dashboard yet. Sweet. I can’t help but wonder what Germany looks like, what with all those other big bands of blue
Do women not die any more?
Am I correct in assuming the strong random spikes in teenage mortality rates in the last few years are due to a (hopefully) small sample sizes for these groups?
Neutral and capitulating countries during the wars are really visible. Nice visualization!
Could you be a little more detailed about the quantity being plotted? You describe it as male deaths divided by female deaths but that wouldn't produce a range in percentages. A year of zero female deaths would yield a ratio of infinity. Sorry to be pedantic but it's only because the plots are eerily fascinating!
Are men in France and Finland ok?
Gender demographics are fascinating
And all the young women around 20 dying before the wars. Childbirth I assume?
Shouldn't there be more excess mortality of women at some age since all the men die before? I would have expected more red at higher ages.
Rare high quality post on this sub. Great visualisation and detailed explanation on how to read it.
Bro is posting about some of the poorest countries in the world. Show the best in the world, USA stats
Male death rate goes up after 18 and kinda settles back around 40s. And goes up again after 50.
We can see clearly how bad tobaco and alcohol are.
What happen in the 1950s? Why did makes started to die so much?
I’m feeling dense what’s the cause of the excess mortality in France from the 50s on for men? Just lifestyle post war?
Where have all the soldiers gone
What software did you use to create this?
I used R and ggplot2 for plotting