In all 217 economies women outlive men — but the gap runs from 5 months to 13 years, and barely tracks how long a country lives

The World Bank publishes life expectancy at birth separately by sex — indicator SP.DYN.LE00.FE.IN for females and SP.DYN.LE00.MA.IN for males — compiled from the United Nations World Population Prospects (UN Population Division), national statistical offices, Eurostat and the WHO. For most economies the yearly values are UN/World Bank model estimates, not counts from complete vital registration; the figures below are those estimates ^mmodeled. Both series were last updated 2026-07-13 and their latest year is 2023. This run pulled the full 2023 panels for both sexes, joined them by country, and excluded the World Bank's regional and income aggregates using the country-metadata endpoint. That left 217 economies with a value for both sexes (territories such as Puerto Rico, Guam, Curaçao and Kuwait are counted separately). In all 217 of those economies, the 2023 female estimate exceeds the male estimate — there is no economy in the series where the male figure comes out ahead. The world aggregate is female 75.8 years, male 70.9, a gap of 4.9 years ^mmodeled. Across the 217 economies the median gap is 5.0 years and the mean 5.2. The size of the gap spans roughly 34-fold. The narrowest is Togo at +0.4 years (female 62.9, male 62.5), followed by Nigeria +0.6, Kuwait +1.0, Bahrain +1.3, Qatar +1.8, Niger +1.9, Libya +2.2 and the United Arab Emirates +2.2 ^mmodeled. The widest is Ukraine at +13.3 years (female 80.2, male 66.9), followed by the West Bank and Gaza +11.8, the Russian Federation +10.7, Latvia +10.1, Georgia +9.5, Belarus +9.5, Vietnam +9.4, Mongolia +9.2, Lithuania +9.0, Moldova +9.0, Estonia +8.8, El Salvador +8.7 and Thailand +8.7 ^mmodeled. For reference, the United States sits at +5.3 (female 81.1, male 75.8), Japan +6.1, China +5.7, France +5.6, the United Kingdom +3.9 and India +3.1 ^mmodeled. The ordering — which economies are narrowest and widest — is a reproducible sort of the modeled series; it depends on where each economy's estimate falls relative to the others ^mmodeled. The gap barely tracks overall longevity, and only weakly tracks income. The Pearson correlation between the gap and each economy's overall (sex-averaged) life expectancy is 0.04 — an essentially zero association; it measures co-movement with overall longevity, not with income. Against national wealth the association is also weak: the correlation between the gap and World Bank GNI per capita (Atlas method, 2023) is −0.16 across the 200 economies with both figures, and 0.04 against log GNI per capita. Split by overall life expectancy into thirds, the mean gap is 4.7 years in the lowest-longevity third, 6.2 in the middle third, and 4.6 in the highest-longevity third. By World Bank income group the means run 4.4 years (low income), 4.7 (lower-middle), 5.9 (upper-middle) and 5.2 (high income). Among the 86 high-income economies the four narrowest gaps are all Gulf states — Kuwait +1.0, Bahrain +1.3, Qatar +1.8, the United Arab Emirates +2.2 — while the widest are post-Soviet: Latvia +10.1, Russia +10.7, Lithuania +9.0, Estonia +8.8 ^mmodeled. Of the 20 economies with the widest gaps, 10 are former Soviet republics ^mmodeled.

The following is analysis, not fact. Read one country at a time, and "women outlive men" is folk wisdom a health desk restates with a local number. Read all 217 economies in a single pull and the first finding is the exceptionlessness: on the World Bank's 2023 estimates there is not one economy — rich or poor, at war or at peace — where the male figure comes out ahead. It is among the few social statistics that point the same direction in every jurisdiction that reports it. The second finding is that the uniformity of direction hides a 34-fold spread in magnitude. A 0.4-year gap in Togo and a 13.3-year gap in Ukraine are the same qualitative fact carrying that 34-fold difference in size, and that size is where the story lives. Crucially, the gap does not line up with longevity as a simple slope: its correlation with overall life expectancy is 0.04, an essentially zero association. That near-zero coefficient is itself the finding — the gap and how long a country lives barely move together. Grouped into thirds, the mean gap is larger in the middle-longevity third (6.2 years) than at either end (4.7 and 4.6); three group means, however, do not establish a general curved relationship, and against the essentially zero correlation the safer reading is that the gap does not track longevity in any regular way rather than that it peaks in the middle ^mmodeled. A single-country correspondent, holding one number, cannot see that the gap does not behave the way intuition — "richer countries, bigger gap" — would predict ^mmodeled. The third finding is that the narrow gaps arrive from opposite directions. Togo, Nigeria and Niger post small gaps at low overall life expectancy — where high mortality falls heavily on both sexes, the difference between them shrinks. Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE post the smallest gaps in the entire high-income group at high overall life expectancy ^mmodeled. The series cannot say why the Gulf pattern holds. One hypothesis in the literature: Gulf populations carry a large, young, screened male migrant workforce, which can pull a country's recorded male mortality down. A study of GCC mortality (Chaabna et al., 2017, in the journal PLoS ONE via PubMed Central) attributes part of the region's declining mortality to this "healthy migrant effect," and UN DESA migrant-stock data record migrant populations exceeding 80 percent in Qatar and the UAE, skewed heavily male. This is a candidate mechanism, not a finding this series can confirm; the dataset records only the outcome ^sspeculative. Two very different national situations produce the same narrow number, which is visible only when the poorest and richest economies are read on one screen. The fourth finding is the concentration at the wide end. Ten of the 20 widest gaps are former Soviet republics, with Russia at +10.7 and the Baltics near or above +9 ^mmodeled. Named analyses of the region attribute its large male shortfall to excess adult-male mortality — RAND's research brief on Russia's mortality crisis and Pew Research (2015) both point to alcohol, cardiovascular disease and related causes concentrated among men, rather than to any female advantage in old age. That reading is theirs, offered here as their explanation, not a claim this series can adjudicate ^sspeculative. Two of the three widest gaps — Ukraine and the West Bank and Gaza — are conflict-affected in 2023, where male mortality carries an additional wartime component and the underlying figures are heavily model-based ^mmodeled.

The strongest caution is what the number is. Life expectancy at birth is a period measure — a synthetic figure built from one year's age-specific death rates, not the realized lifespan of any actual cohort — and for most of the 217 economies the 2023 value is a UN/World Bank model estimate rather than a count from complete vital registration. That matters most where the story is loudest: the Ukraine and West Bank and Gaza figures are wartime model estimates and should be read as such, and a future World Population Prospects revision can move any borderline case. The direction of every gap is robust; the precise magnitudes are estimates. A second caution is that the gap conflates level and cause. A narrow gap can mean a converged, healthy population (the Gulf reading offered by some researchers) or a uniformly high-mortality one (the Sahel); the number alone does not distinguish them, which is why this piece reports the two clusters separately rather than pooling them. Whether the residual female advantage that persists even in the narrowest-gap economies reflects a biological floor or simply behavioral and occupational risk that has not yet equalized is genuinely contested in the demographic literature, and the World Bank series cannot settle it — the Gulf's +1.0 to +2.2 gaps are consistent with a small non-behavioral difference but do not establish one ^sspeculative. A third: the panel counts 217 economies including small territories, so "every economy" is a statement about jurisdictions in the series, not a population-weighted claim — though with the gap positive in all of them, a population weighting would not change its sign. The clustering by income group and region uses the World Bank's own classifications, which are conventions.

A health correspondent files the local version: American men trail women by five years, Russian men by 10. Reading all 217 economies at once shows what no single-country desk can — that the direction is exceptionless (women ahead in 217 of 217, no jurisdiction excepted) while the magnitude is anything but, spanning 34-fold; that the size barely tracks overall longevity (correlation 0.04, essentially zero) and only weakly tracks income (correlation −0.16 against GNI per capita); and that the two narrowest-gap clusters sit at opposite poles of income — the Sahel and the Gulf — arriving at the same small number from opposite directions, while the widest gaps concentrate in ten post-Soviet states. The universal fact is that women outlive men everywhere. The fact you can only see from the whole record is that what matters is not whether, but how much — and that "how much" barely lines up with how rich a country is.