Decomposing mortality inequality among men and women in Sweden

Introduction: Aim of this study is to identify how socio-demographic factors contribute to the mortality differences among men and women in Sweden.
Methods: We used data from the Linnaeus Database in 2005. We analyzed using multivariate logistic regression to estimate the adjusted effects of each socio-demographic factor on mortality among men and women. Later we used a variant of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique partition to measure mortality differences among men and women.
Results:Mortality rates ratio among women and men was 1.03. The difference mean of mortality rate among men and women was 0.004156. Approximately 23% of the inequality was attributed to the difference in “explained” component and 77% due to “unexplained” component. Of the “explained” components, 86% of the contribution came from education, whilst number of sibling and country of birth contributed less. The remaining 19% of the “explained” inequality was attributed to differences in the distribution of age among men and women. Of the “unexplained” component, education and number of siblings made negative contributions. Country of birth made small but statistically significant contributions.
Conclusion: This study confirmed how differences in socio-demographic and economic characteristics explained the mortality differences by gender in Sweden.