Triangulation on the Gender Gap in Life Expectancy

Today, Austrian women live about five and a half years longer than Austrian men. The reasons are various biological and behavioural factors, such as smoking, alcohol consumption, accidents or risk factors related to employment. The gender gap in life expectancy used to increase in favour of women until the beginning of the 1980s, but is has been narrowing continuously for the last 30 years. Our project dealt with the questions why women live longer than men and why the sex differences in mortality are narrowing. To tackle these questions we used a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods. Conducting interviews with general practitioners, gender medicine researchers and geriatric nurses, we developed explanations and hypotheses that were analysed statistically with the help of large datasets. Our application of this triangulation has proved to be an innovative research approach that offers a wide range of results. The main result can be summarised as followed: the increasing proportion of women smoking and the increasing healthy lifestyle of men are major factors for the narrowing gender gap in life expectancy. A central point of our results is the influence of gender roles on health behaviour. The interviews suggest that women anticipate formerly risky male behaviour patterns. This trend is related to changing norms as well as the rising workforce participation of women which in turn is responsible for higher levels of stress. These higher levels of stress are responsible, among other factors, for the increasing nicotine consumption of women which has been observed since the 1960s. Men on the contrary - especially young men - adopt positive female attributes. They nowadays care more for their health, exercise more and are more likely to abstain from cigarettes. Our quantitative analyses confirmed that the trend for the development of the different life expectancy of men and women is mainly caused by nicotine consumption. Our results extend the understanding of sex-specific differences in life expectancy. The observation that not only women adopt what used to be masculine behaviour patterns, but that men on the other hand adopt formerly feminine behaviour patterns, is an interesting phenomenon that is not only relevant for mortality research but also for many other different scientific fields.