No, according to a study by Fred Pampel of the University of Colorado in this month's issue of the journal Demography. Using data from 21 countries, spanning four decades, he finds that measures of gender equality (percentages of women working outside the home, women remaining unmarried, birth rates, and divorce rates) do not explain the gap between men's and women's lung-cancer death rates. The gap is very high in some countries where women's status is relatively low, such as Italy and Greece. But it is also high in gender-egalitarian countries like Finland and France. The gap is relatively small in Sweden and Denmark, where women's status is quite high. But the gap is also narrow in Ireland and Japan, which score lower on the measures of women's status.
Pampel shows that the gap is best explained historically. He starts the clock in the year when a country's smoking rate reaches one-half of its eventual peak - some four decades later, men's lung cancer rates reach their peak, and then start to decline. Women's smoking starts to follow men's on the upswing. So, after a typical lag of around three decades, women's lung-cancer death rate also follows men's rate upwards. The gap between men's and women's lung-cancer death rates just depends on how far along on this curve their nation has traveled. The gap is greatest when men's death rates approach their peak and women's are just starting to rise, and then it narrows. Most of the high-income categories, the United States included, are now in the period of narrowing gaps.
Pampel still sees mysteries in the gender differences in smoking: Will women smoke less in the future and cause the gap in lung cancer to widen again? And he sees mysteries in the differences among nations: Why did the Irish get started earlier on the death curve than did the French? But his research disputes the notion that gender equality in life leads to gender equality in death.
Demography is the peer-reviewed journal published by the Population Association of America. The full article, "Declining Sex Differences in Mortality from Lung Cancer in High-Income Nations," is available on http://www.prb.org/cpipr. Username: cpipr; password: demography. Or call the Center for Public Information on Population Research, 202-939-5414. The Center, a project of the Population Reference Bureau, is funded by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development.
Journal
Demography