Gender inequalities in life expectancy provide a broader picture by combining two sets of statistical measures: the usual static gap at a given point in time and the innovative S-time-distance measure as the gap in time for a given level of the indicator.
Firstly, this offers an innovative approach for looking at disparities over many units and over time. The new S-time-distance measure, expressed in time units, is easy to understand by everybody and offers a novel way to compare situations in economics, politics, business, and statistics.
Secondly, while women expect to live longer than men for 99.5 percent of the world population, the empirical results show astonishing differences among countries in gender disparity in life expectancy around the globe.
Firstly, gender disparities in life expectancy analysed in Gaptimer Report No. 2 'How much longer live women than men around the globe?' uses the theoretical concept of time distance dimension of inequality. This provides two innovative generic statistical measures S-time-distance and S-time-step to complement (not replace) the existing mostly static measures of inequality in many fields. This is an additional dimension to assess the reality that disparities can be very persuasive and a long-standing phenomenon.
'As Sicherl (1973, 1993) proposes ... observed time distance is a dynamic measure of temporal disparity between the two series intuitively clear, readily measurable, and in transparent units. It is suggested that one should complement conventional measures with horizontal measures.'
(Granger and Jeon, 1997)
C.W.J. Granger and Y. Jeon, University of California at San Diego
The time distance measure shows the reality with new eyes. The overall life expectancy the static difference between China and Sweden was less than 10 percent (which may appear to be small) while the S-time-distance was 51 years, (which gives a very different perception of the magnitude of the gap).
Potential users of this methodology and results are very many at various levels: international and national organizations, NGOs, experts, businesses, managers, educators, students, interest groups, media, and the general public.
Secondly, one of the main points in this study are astonishing differences between countries for gender inequality in life expectancy, which are confirmed by two methods: the respective world ranks and by very large time distances between the female and male trends of life expectancy. For example, Estonia occupied rank 51 the world for females and 110 for males. On the other extreme, e.g. the rank for Qatar was 65 for females and only 12 for males. For gender disparity in life expectancy S-time-distance for the world average, i.e. the horizontal time gap between trends of female and male life expectancy amounted to 20 years, 28 years for the EU27 and 35 years for the USA, showing a large and persistent gap in favour of women.
The time distance concept can influence the perception and decisions of people when they are assessing their relative position in their surroundings, in the society and across countries over time. For the EU27 average it is shown that the time delay for life expectancy of males behind females was large at about 27 years; the relationship is very persistent and it changes very slowly.
In the EU there are 10 countries with S-time-distance delay of male behind the female life expectancy more than 30 years, for five of them more than 50 years, i.e. more than half a century. The absolute difference in gender disparity in life expectancy for 269 EU27 NUTS2 regions ranged from 2.3 to 10.9 years of life, with a median value of 5.5 years; the same median value for 3118 US counties. More detailed regional results are prepared for the UK and Italy.
