Sex, Race, Marital Status, Education: Four Factors that Add Up to 18 Years of Life Expectancy

A new study shows a dramatic variation in life expectancy based on these social determinants of health.

Two individuals in the United States are celebrating their 30th birthday. It’s a good day. They are entering the prime of their life.

One is a married white female with a university degree. One is a never-married white male with a high school diploma.

How many more years of life can these two individuals look forward to?

There’s a fairly dramatic difference. The man can expect 37.1 more years of life on average — living to be about 67. The woman can expect to live to age 85. That’s a life-expectancy discrepancy of 18 years based solely on gender, education, and marital status.

I’m using these two cases to illustrate the extremes of life expectancy across four key social determinants of health: sex, race, marital status, and education. I think we all have some sense of how these factors play out in terms of health, but a new study suggests it’s actually quite a bit more complicated than we thought.

Let me start by acknowledging my own bias here. As a clinical researcher, I sometimes find it…