The Role of Gender Factor in Population Mortality

The modern sciences more often use the gender factor in the interpretative procedure. Demographers also have chance to involve this factor in analysis. There are some indicators of gender gaps or inequalities in distribution of resources located in both microenvironment (households) and macroenvironment. Human capital formation and development also demonstrate gender inequalities in process. Population mortality analysis usually uses sex variable in explanation of differences by age, time, causes of death, etc. We shall try to underline particularly gender factor in population mortality that is gender on social sense. We are interested in how social roles, social relations, gender (social) behavior influence on gender overmortality. Thus, in this paper gender factor will means only social factor in opposite to sex factor like biological one. In modern literature definition of “gender overmortality” includes both social and biological factor of overmortality with stress on biological one. We would like to stress the social factor that is gender mortality is in opposite to sex overmortality. It is obviously that to make the clear frontier between social and biological factor of overmortality it is the difficult task. Moreover, we could not very often describe social factor of overmortality by the formal way. Most of the hypothesis on the gender (social) overmortality require further study in different countries before the conclusion can be reached. We try to allot and describe social factor of overmortality by age. Who is in advantage in terms of survival: men or women? In which ages? In which time? Is there typical gender behavior influencing on gap in mortality? What are the discriminative practices which could be causes of gender overmortality? We consider three “lines” of gender factor action: socio-historical “line” (epidemiological transition); behavioral “line” and “line” of discriminative practices. The last one plays significant role and could determine in particularly two others. (Table 1).