You might catch your grandmother looking wistfully across the room at your grandfather and then saying: ‘‘It’s sad to think he’ll be going into the ground before me.’’

It’s not just sad, granny – it might be wrong.

Women do have a survival advantage over men; this has been the case since the beginning of the 20th century when more women survived childbirth.

This advantage is supported by life expectancy figures. By this measure, women are expected to live longer than men, and they often do.

But life expectancy is an overall summary of the average length of life, and doesn’t drill down into the number of actual years lived by individuals.

Still, it appears to support the blanket statement that ‘men don’t live as long as women’.

Of course, common sense says that some men do.

But how many?

Researchers from the Interdisciplinary Centre on Population Dynamics at Syddansk University, Denmark, have found that between 25 to 50 per cent of men have outlived women on all continents since the year 1751.

Overall, men have a high probability of outliving women. Photo: Getty

In other words, one and two out of every four men have outlived women for the past 200 years or so.

Overall, the researchers found that men have a high probability of outliving women – especially those who are married and have a degree – according to analysis published in the open access journal BMJ Open.

The analysis

The researchers set out to ‘‘quantify the probability that males outlive females over time and across populations; and to explore the impact of changes in life expectancy and variations in lifespan between the sexes’’.

For this, they used a statistical approach called the ‘outsurvival’ statistic  – which measures the ‘‘probability that a person from a population with a high death rate will outlive someone from a population with a low death rate’’.

The researchers drew on life tables by sex and individual years for 41 countries from the Human Mortality Database, plus separate data for East and West Germany, and for the the UK.

They also dug into abridged life tables from the World Population Prospects 2019, which provided sex-specific life tables for 199 countries by five-year age groups and five-year periods from 1950 to 1954 and 2015 to 2019.

They also compared ‘‘the probability of men outliving women by education level and marital status, using national US statistics on deaths and population counts’’.

Good news for married, well-educated men when it comes to living longer. Photo: Getty

Some detail in the findings

• In developed countries, the probability of males outliving females fell until the 1970s, after which it gradually increased in all populations
• The rise and fall in sex differences in life expectancy were mainly attributed to smoking and other behavioural differences
• The probability of males living longer than females is generally higher in low- and middle-income countries, but this doesn’t necessarily mean greater gender equality in survival
• In South Asian countries, survival rates were above 50 per cent for men in the 1950s and 1960s
• The death rate for children under five in India was higher for girls than for boys and has remained higher for girls in recent years – but fewer girls than boys above the age of 15 have died since the 1980s, ‘balancing out’ the disadvantage at younger ages
• Certain external factors seem to have a key role. For example, between 2015 and 2019, the probability of males outliving females was 40 per cent across the entire US population
• But this statistic varied, depending on marital status and educational attainment: The probability of men outliving women was 39 per cent for those who were married, and 37 per cent for those who weren’t. It was 43 per cent for those with a university degree, and 39 per cent for those without a high school diploma
• However, more baby boys die than baby girls in most countries.

What the authors say

In their paper, the authors note: “A blind interpretation of life expectancy differences can sometimes lead to a distorted perception of the actual inequalities [in lifespan].

“Not all females outlive males, even if a majority do. But the minority that do not is not small.

“For example, a sex difference in life expectancy at birth of 10 years can be associated with a probability of males outliving females as high as 40 per cent, indicating that 40 per cent of males have a longer lifespan than that of a randomly paired female.”

Still, women rule

The analysis showed that the death rate has fallen faster for women, overall, than for men under the age of 50, especially in the first half of the 20th century, largely as a result of improvements in infant and child deaths.

Men have not only maintained their survival disadvantage at younger ages (by being violent or foolish) but at older ages too.

They are more prone to accidents and homicides in their 20s and 30s, and they tend to smoke and drink more, leading to higher cancer prevalence and death in their 60s.