Researchers' findings show that between one to two men out of every four have outlived women

The long-standing belief that women tend to outlive men has recently been challenged by a new statistical analysis involving data spanning the last 200 years, SciTechDaily has reported.

According to the media outlet, the authors of the new research employed a statistical approach known as the “outsurvival” statistic, which “measures the probability that a person from a population with a high death rate will outlive someone from a population with a low death rate”.

Using this approach while reviewing information about people who lived in virtually every continent during the last 200 years, researchers ended up with the data showing that between one to two men out of every four have outlived women during the period of time in question.

The team’s findings also suggest that men with a university degree had higher odds of outliving women, and that the probability of married men outliving women was higher than it was in the case of unmarried men. The research, however, also shows that the death rate for women overall decreased faster than for men under the age of fifty, primarily due to improvements in infant and child deaths, the media outlet noted.