I’ve noticed that most sex-ratio population statistics say that there are practically just as many men in the world as women (with a few notable exceptions. Yo, what’s up with Russia?).
But from personal experience it seems that men die more frequently and sooner. War waging, fast driving, risk-taking, crime-doing, thrill-seeking, hard-drinking, drug-ingesting, dangerous job working, suicide-commiting, drunking deer hunting… mostly guy stuff. Seriously, how many girls do you know who’ve killed themselves surfing on the top of a station wagon or electricuted themselves snipping the wires of streetlights or doing extreme jerking-off? And even if we manage to survive beyond our reckless years we still snuff it about ten years earlier than women anyway.
Are these statistics accurate? How do they reach these numbers in the first place? Is it possible that child-birth is still risky enough to be skewing the numbers?
According to Chuck Shepherd’s News of the Weird “A 13-year-old girl was killed ‘surfing’ atop a speeding SUV driven by a 16-year-old boy (Pensacola, Fla., May).”
I have no idea if the stats are accurate. Childbirth is not skewing the numbers in America; our maternal mortality rate is somewhere around a dozen or so per hundred thousand, and it’s even lower in some other western countries. But it might be skewing the numbers worldwide.
As your sex-ratio link shows, the number of males and females at birth is not the same. Typically there are 1.05 or 1.06 males born for every female born. At conception, the difference is even more striking, about 1.25 males for every female. Males have a higher death rate even inside the womb.
Amazing, I started to reply to your post with some examples of countries with different patterns (Burkina Faso, Brasil, China, Germany, India, U.S.A.) It just got to big and complicated for a post here, but here’s what I took from this:
Some countries have very large, young populations, so the propensity for females to out survive males in the long run is offset by the ability of people to procreate at an amazing rate and die young (for a variety of reasons).
Some countries are growing slowly and the population is skewing to older and women.
Some countries appear to kill off their women at a young age. These countries traditionally value males over females (editorial comment: FOOLS!)
In the end it all seems to fairly balance out.
[sub]Note: For reference I used the CIA Factbook[/sub]
Regarding Russia, which is basically similar to most other countries in the m:f ratio until you get to the over 65 crowd, I would guess that such a small male population is due to the fact that Russia suffered HUGE casualties during WW2 (mainly male) . .I’m thinking it was something around 11 million compared to the US’s 300,000.