Life expectancy at a given age
Male vs Female
If you ask a man his life expectancy, he'll likely say 74; if you ask a woman, she'll say 80. This isn’t exactly true. Those values are the life expectancy at birth or, better, the expected age of death when one is born. What most people don’t know is that every year you live, your expected age of death goes up. Further, because males are particularly adept at getting dead, their expected age of death increases more each year than females.
Let’s go to the data.
The data come from the Social Security Administration actuarial life table. The period life table I’m using is the most recent, which is 2021.
A period life table is based on the mortality experience of a population during a relatively short period of time. Here we present the 2021 period life table for the Social Security area population, as used in the 2024 Trustees Report (TR).
The data for the charts can be found on my GitHub site. Figure 1 is the expected age of death at a given age. I added a table of this data at the bottom if you’d like to know exact values.
As you can see, every year you live through, your expected age of death goes up. For example, a 50-year-old male is expected to live until 78, while a female of the same age is expected to live until 82. The five-year gap at birth between males and females has dropped to 4 years, which illustrates the point that the slope of the male curve is steeper than that of the female curve. In other words, the male expected age of death increases more each year they live through. We explore this in the next graph.
Figure 2 is a graph of the years of life gained by living through the given age. Reaching age 1 adds nearly half a year to life expectancy. Thereafter, the gains are about zero for both males and females until around age 15; males gain more than females. Once we get to age 20, the male gains are more, but they don’t seem to change that much. We need an additional graph to clarify the differences in life expectancy gains between males and females.
Figure 3 is the male gain in expected death for living through the given age minus the female gain in expected death for living through the given age. Keep in mind that females still gain years, just not as many as males.
At only 1 age, age 1, do females gain more than males. The bars jump up as we enter the late teen years. Essentially, with each passing year, males in their teens or early 20s tend to gain more than their female counterparts. This is largely an artifact of risky male behavior.
There is another jump entering the 50s. The heart disease years for males. According to the CDC, in 2023, heart disease was the #1 killer among males aged 55–64 (55,126) and 65+ (288,277). For females, heart disease is the #2 killer for ages 55–64, with only 24,600 deaths, whereas the #1 killer is malignant neoplasms (cancer), with 47,673 deaths. Heart disease emerges as the leading cause of death for females aged 65 and above, accounting for a total of 266,136 deaths, which is approximately 20,000 fewer than for males in the same age group.
As males pass age 70, the gains compared to females go back down. This may sound a bit tongue-in-cheek, but essentially, if a male avoids car accidents or reckless behavior during his teens and 20s and subsequently avoids a heart attack, he could potentially live almost as long as a female. As you can see in Figure 1, the expected age at death gap between males and females becomes very small as both sexes age.
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Bio
I am a tenured mathematics professor at Ithaca College (PhD in Math: Stochastic Processes, MS in Applied Statistics, MS in Math, BS in Math, BS in Exercise Science), and I consider myself an accidental academic (opinions are my own). I'm a gardener, drummer, rower, runner, inline skater, 46er, and R user. I’ve written the textbooks “R for College Mathematics and Statistics” and “Applied Calculus with R.” I welcome any collaborations.