Rose Harker who is over 100 years old, at her home in North LondonLONDON, England (The Times),
October 25, 2007:
Life expectancy for professional women has shot up by 30 months to 85 years in only the last four years, while the gap between the top and bottom classes has widened.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics published yesterday show that females in high-status, well-paid jobs such as medicine, law and finance are living longer than ever. Their counterparts in clerical and manual jobs, however, are struggling to keep pace as their lifestyles and life expectancy emulate their male colleagues.
Diet, drinking and smoking are taking their toll on women in the lower social classes but health experts suggest that females at the top are in better shape than ever, have quicker access to healthcare, are no longer dying from breast cancer and can afford better holidays. Some epidemiologists also suggest that women get a psychological boost from a high-status job where they are largely in control.
The figures show that the life expectancy at birth for women in the top social class, or those who married into it, jumped from 82.6 years in 2001 to 85.1 years in 2005, an increase of 2.5years. This rise is at a much faster rate than the rest of the past 30 years where life expectancy has gone up about two years in every ten. During the same period the life expectancy for women in the lowest social class — unskilled workers and labourers — rose from 77.9 to 78.1 years, an increase of only ten weeks.
In male mortality, the opposite appears to be happening. Life expectancy in men has been catching up with women over the past 30 years, but since 2001 the increase has dropped slightly and the gap between the social classes has slightly narrowed.
Life expectancy for men in the professional classes rose from 79.5 years in 2001 to 80 years in 2005. At the same time the life span for unskilled workers rose from 71.5 to 72.7 years. A similar picture occurs in life expectancy from the age of 65. A women in Social Class 1 now aged 65 was expected to live to 85 in 2005, but is now expected to carry on to 87. However, the corresponding figures for women in Social Class 5 only rose from 81.9 to 82.7 years.
Eric Brunner, a reader in epidemiology at University College London, could not fully explain the acceleration in life expectancy for woman in the top social classes in the past four years. But he said that access to cash and high self-esteem has a big impact on health and longevity. “Money, wealth and resources, particularly psychological, mean that women feel more in control of their lives.”
Women are also categorised in Social Class 1 if they are married to men working in the professions, so many of them may be able to take on part-time jobs or not work at all.
Alcohol, smoking, poor diet and better health services in earlier life would all be factors in the widening gap between the social classes.
“There are different smoking patterns in men and women over the last 40 years,” said Dr Brunner. “The peak mortality rates for men with lung cancer was in the early 1970s while the peak rate for women was in the mid-1990s.”
In addition, there was a much greater class divide in obesity levels among women, with far more obese females in the lowest classes. There is no significant difference among men.
Professor Mel Bartley, a director of the Economic and Social Research Centre, said that women in the top social classes were more likely to get breast cancer but now less likely to die from it. Better screening techniques and drug treatments such as Tamoxifen had had a huge impact on mortality in recent years.
Brian Johnson, a statistician for the ONS, said that the figures for Social Class 1 and Social Class 5 had a higher level of variation than the other larger social classes so it was difficult to tell if the data marked a trend or a blip. The 2001 figures had shown a slight shift downwards in female life expectancy and this data had now reverted to the general trend of growing life expectancy, he suggested. He pointed to the narrowing of the gap between the manual classes and non-manual classes in males, particularly those over 65, which he said was more reliable.
The figures also show that between 1972 and 2005, men and women in non-manual occupations had a greater increase in life expectancy at birth and at age 65 than those classified by manual occupations.
For men, there was an eight-year increase in life expectancy at birth in non-manual workers, who range from clerks, cashiers and retail staff to doctors and lawyers, compared with a 6.8-year rise for those for manual workers, who range from labourers and cleaners to plumbers and electricians. But for women the corresponding figures were only 5.2 years and 4.8 years respectively.
Unskilled female workers aged 65 can now expect to live 17.7 years more, on average, than they did between 1972 and 1976, while women in the top social class now aged 65 are expected to outlive their mid-1970s predecessors by 22 years. An unskilled man now aged 65 can expect to live 14.1 years longer than his counterparts did in 1972-76 — to the same age as the professionals of the day. A 65-year-old high-status man is now expected to live 18.3 years longer than he would have done 30 years ago.
“There has been a longstanding difference in mortality in social classes, particularly between the highest and lowest classes,” said Mr Johnson. “But in women there is no evidence of further widening, and in men there is some tentative evidence of narrowing in the higher age groups.”
The definition
Life expectancy at birth for a particular social class and time period is an estimate of the number of years a newborn baby would survive if they experienced average mortality rates of that social class for that time period throughout their life
Source: Office for National Statistics
A divided society: How Britons fall into their separate categories
1 This includes members of the top professions such as doctors, chartered accountants, lawyers, professionally qualified engineers and bankers who earn high salaries. Women who are married to men in these jobs will also be categorised in the top social class even if they do not work or work in a less skilled job.
2 This category covers managerial and technical jobs such as middle managers, journalists, school teachers, nurses, academics and computer technicians. They will earn less money and have more stressful jobs than those in the top social class. Women are more likely to be married and have children.
3 This group is split between skilled manual and non-manual. The latter category includes clerks, cashiers, call-centre operators, secretaries and retail staff who are on low salaries and generally have less control over their jobs. The former category of skilled manual workers includes plumbers, electricians, builders, drivers of goods vehicles and the supervisors of the above
4 These partly skilled workers include warehousemen, security guards, machine tool operators, care assistants, waiters and waitresses. They will typically be on low wages, work long hours and have little control over how or when they work.
5 This group of unskilled workers includes labourers, cleaners and messengers who will be earning not much more than the minimum wage. They and the group above them are much more likely to be heavy smokers and drinkers and prone to obesity and heart-related diseases. They will tend to be less capable of accessing quick health or social care.
By Jill Sheerman, Whitehall Editor
© Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.
