It's more dangerous to be a man
In every country on Earth, it's more dangerous to be a man.
I went looking for an exception and there isn't one. Across all 212 countries with data, men are more likely than women to die between the ages of 15 and 60. Not most countries. Every country: 212 out of 212. When something holds in every single case, you stop calling it a tendency and start calling it a rule.
How big?
The measure is adult mortality: out of 1,000 people alive at 15, how many are dead before 60. Averaged across the world, the gap between men and women is about 66 per 1,000. That's abstract, so here's Russia, where it's widest. Of 1,000 Russian boys alive at 15, 294 will die before they reach 60. For Russian girls the number is 96. Same country, same decade, same economy; 198 more deaths per thousand, for the single reason of being male.
Where?
The widest gaps cluster in the former Soviet bloc. Ranked from the top, it's Russian Federation (+198), El Salvador (+164), Moldova (+161), Mongolia (+160), Belarus (+151), Ukraine (+151). You can read the whole table, all 212 countries, sorted.
But here's the part that surprised me. The gap never closes. San Marino has the narrowest spread in the world, and men there still die at a higher rate than women, by 6 per 1,000. No country has solved this. No country has even stumbled into reversing it for a single year. The needle points the same way from Iceland to Lesotho.
Why?
I'm not going to hand you one cause, because this data can't prove one, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Part of it is biology; men die at higher rates than women at almost every age, and that shows up before anyone has taken a drink or a risk. Part of it is how men live and die: violence, road crashes, suicide, and heavy drinking all skew male, and all of them peak in exactly the 15-to-60 window this measure counts.
So is it the vodka? 5 of the ten countries with the biggest gaps also sit in the world's top 25 for recorded alcohol. That's a striking overlap, and I'll leave it there, because a correlation is not a cause, and the alcohol figures only count what's recorded; the home-distilled samogon that does much of the damage in these countries never makes the official numbers. I can show you the two lists line up. I can't show you which one moves the other.
The same story, told by the survivors
If you don't trust mortality rates, count the living. Walk into a room of Russians over 65 and you'll find roughly 51 men for every 100 women. The men who would have been there died earlier, decade after decade, and the old-age sex ratio is the receipt. It's the same fact from the other end of the telescope.
Am I sure?
A cross-country snapshot like this hides plenty. It can't see the difference between a rich man and a poor one inside the same country, and it freezes a moving picture into a single frame. Those are real limits and I'm not going to wave them away. But the direction of the thing is not in doubt. 212 out of 212 is not a trend you argue with.
So?
The male mortality penalty is one of the most consistent facts in public health and one of the least talked about. It costs more years of life than most of the diseases that get the headlines, and it does it quietly, everywhere, all the time. If you want to see it for yourself, open the console, put adult mortality on the axis, and switch on comparison mode. Every dot in the world falls on the same side of the line. Then ask why nobody's talking about it.