How Britain’s well-off men are now outliving the average woman

AFFLUENT and successful men can now expect to outlive the average woman, according to an official analysis yesterday.

It is the first time that the most long-lived men have overtaken the majority of women in terms of the age they can expect to reach.

Over the past 30 years, the life expectancy gap between the sexes has closed sharply as the way men and women live their lives has been transformed.

The heavy industrial jobs and unhealthy habits that once cut men’s lives short have been disappearing, while more women have been joining the workforce.

An Office for National Statistics report said the wealthiest men at the top of their trades and professions can now expect to live for 82.5 years – compared with the 82.4 years calculated as the lifespan of an average woman.

Lower down the income scale men are catching up with women fast. Among people classed as ‘lower supervisory’, including factory foremen or shop supervisors, men have seen their life expectancy improving at double the rate of women.

Between the early 1980s and the late 2000s, men in this group saw their lives lengthen on average by 6.6 years to 78.9, while the lives of women of the same status extended by 3.3 years to 81.9.

The report broke down life expectancy in England and Wales by social class, using the ONS Longitudinal Study, which records the lives of nearly 300,000 people from year to year. It compared life expectancy in the five years from 1982 to 1986 with the period between 2007 and 2011.

The report said: ‘Over the past 30 years the average man has seen his life expectancy improve by seven years to 79.1, whereas improvement for the average woman was just four and a half years to 82.4.’

It found that women in the wealthiest group, which includes senior managers in large firms and top-level professionals, still have the longest life expectancy – 85.2 years for a new-born girl.

But even in this bracket, men are catching up, improving by a year since the early 1980s, while women have gained by 0.9 years.

Commenting on the reducing lifespan gap between the sexes, the report said: ‘Since the 1970s, men have been catching up with women in terms of survival.

‘ The decline of the mining industry and the move away from physical labour and manufacturing industries towards the service sector is a likely cause, along with a reduction in the proportion of men smoking.’

The ONS analysts also found that the large-scale movement of women away from the traditional model of wives and home-makers into education, careers, and the stressful combination of jobs and child-rearing, may be influencing female life expectancy.

Last year the ONS acknowledged that ‘increases in women entering the labour force over the last 50 years are considered to have had an impact on levels of stress, smoking and drinking, leading to changes in the health of females’.

‘Fewer men are smoking’