The NY Times recently reported that white women who have never graduated from high school have lost 5 years from their average lifespan over the past 20 years.
Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.
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The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.
White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks.
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The decline among the least educated non-Hispanic whites, who make up a shrinking share of the population, widened an already troubling gap. The latest estimate shows life expectancy for white women without a high school diploma was 73.5 years, compared with 83.9 years for white women with a college degree or more. For white men, the gap was even bigger: 67.5 years for the least educated white men compared with 80.4 for those with a college degree or better.
So one thing that happened was that the gap closed somewhat between uneducated white women and men. Uneducated white men have short lives, barely making it past retirement age.
It’s pretty clear why uneducated white men’s lives are shorter than they used to be: their social status and job opportunities have declined significantly since the 80s. There’s probably also some selection bias (uneducated white men are from a more hapless group of people today than they were 20 years ago), but this doesn’t explain such a profound difference between uneducated and educated white men. No, what happened is that these men have fallen to the bottom of the totem pole in society, and the bottom and top are farther from each other than they used to be.
But why would uneducated white women’s lifespans have fallen even farther? For starters, it was a lot higher than their equivalent men to start with. Where there used to be an eight year difference, it is now six, while amongst the educated the gender life gap is only three and a half years.
However, you’d think with the emphasis on feminism and women’s empowerment, white women would have seen progress just as black and Hispanic men did. This is probably what is alarming people — things didn’t work out exactly as they were supposed to. Poor, uneducated white men losing a few years was to be expected; their social decline is part of the program and surely anticipated in advance (the professors who do these studies and the social engineers who implement the programs based on them are well aware of how different factors affect people and their lives — these are pretty intelligent people for the most part). So the five year drop in white women’s lifespan is kind of a fly in the ointment.
Well, I’d be happy to fill these social scientists in on what’s happening. For the overwhelming majority of women, their main source of wealth and support is the men of their social class. No amount of government programs and feminism can make up for that.
What happened was that there was a joint breakdown of both the family and the men’s status about 30-40 years ago, and the effects are starting to be shown in the women. As equivalent-status men were thrown out of the family and employment, uneducated women lost crucial support over the years, and that takes its toll. Their main source of support – their men – underwent a rapid decline, and the women suffered for it.
You really can’t separate the outcomes of a group’s women from those of the men. Men and women are socially bound to one another. When one group suffers, so does the other. When men are defeated in war, the women pay a price as well. When male unemployment goes up, female wealth goes down, too.
This is why, when you really get down to it, feminism as practiced in the US amounts to little more than class warfare. It’s a net bonus for educated elites’ wives, because their relative status in society increases as the rest of the country declines. For the rest of us, it’s pure poison. For our families, our children, and yes, even for our women.
