Modeling the relationship between male and female mortality patterns

Anastasia Kostaki, Athens University of Economics and Business
Paraskevi Peristera, Athens University of Economics and Business
Jan Lanke, Lund University, Sweden

It is generally known that the age-specific death probabilities exhibit a typical pattern common in all human populations. It is also extensively known that, in every population, males and females experience significantly different mortality levels. However the gap between the mortality patterns of the two sexes is different in the various parts of the total life span. An interesting empirical finding investigated in this work is that the mortality deviations between males and females in modern human populations also follow a typical pattern. In this paper we present this pattern and also provide a flexible model for its description. For evaluating the adequacy of this model we fit it to a variety of empirical data sets. This model can serve for describing the deviations between the two patterns and also facilitate comparisons of the shape and the severity of these deviations between time and space.