Improvement in female survival: A quiet revolution in Bangladesh

Biologically a female is more capable of surviving than a male (Madigan, 1957). This fact is also reflected in the Model Life Tables (Coale and Demeney, 1983), which are based on a compilation of historical European data and from a few, quite limited data sets available in the early 1960s for other regions of the world. Currently, in most of the developed countries the expectation of life at birth for a female is longer than for a male by five or six years. However, the picture was different until recently in several South Asian countries including Bangladesh (DSS, 1992), where expectation of life for males was higher than for females. The scenario started to change recently in this country (DSS, 1995). However, the expectation of life is an age-standardized summary measure of mortality and does not give a clear picture of the change in mortality in different age groups. Mortality may be affected differently at different ages by various events such as birth, which affects a female only, and different life-styles such as occupation. In this article, an attempt has been made to examine the time trends of mortality and make a relative comparison of the mortality change between males and females in different age groups in a rural area in Bangladesh.