Is between-sex convergence also happening in lifespan disparity? Decomposing sex differences in lifespan disparity by causes of death in Switzerland?

While women's advantage over men in terms of longevity has increased in most Western countries over the 20th century, we observe a convergence of life expectancy at different ages since the early 1980s. This new convergence cannot be retraced to a singular cause and seems to be largely driven by medical progress and behavioral factors. Objective The objective of this work is to test if male and female lifespan inequality has approximated simultaneously to the new convergence in longevity. We then examine the contribution of changes in the cause of death distribution to these developments. Data and Methods We obtained yearly single-age group mortality rates for each sex for the years 1951 to 2015 from the Human Mortality Database and calculated life tables for the comparison of life expectancy at age 0, at age 50, the standard deviation and e-dagger. In a second step, we decomposed changes in the four measures by cause of death applying the recently proposed Contour Decomposition Method (2017). Cause of death information were extracted from the WHO mortality database. Results Preliminary results suggest a divergence of sex-specific lifespan inequality in the 1950s which was followed by a convergence since the 1980s mainly associated with a fast decrease of lifespan disparity in the male population. Main conclusion The new convergence of longevity in Switzerland was accompanied by an opening and closing of the sex gap in lifespan disparity. In the following step, we aim to identify the main causes of death that can be associated with such a development.This work was supported by the LONGPOP project which has received funding from the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 676060 and the project LONGHEALTH CSO2015-69834-R funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and CompetitivenessPeer reviewe