Population
Boys outnumber girls, women outnumber men
Population by age, 2007, UK
In mid-2007 there were 31.0 million women compared with 29.9 million men in the UK population.
There were between 13,000 and 26,000 more males than females at each age from birth through to the age of 20. The number of young men relative to young women generally decreased throughout the 20s age group. This is because of different levels of migration for men and women at these ages (15 to 24-year-olds). Although the number of deaths at these ages were low, higher death rates among young men from accidents and suicide than among young women have also contributed to the fall in the number of males in their 20s.
At all ages above 31, women outnumbered men. This difference in number between the sexes widened through the 30s and mid-40s age groups, then remained fairly steady throughout the late 40s to the mid-50s age groups. This was because the generations born in the 1950s were smaller than those born in the 1960s. However, the ratio at ages 31 to 55 remained fairly constant, between 1.00 and 1.03 women to men.
For people in their mid-50s onwards, the gap between the sexes widened, as death rates increased at older ages. The higher mortality rates for men compared with women produced sufficient numbers of deaths to affect the sex ratio. This difference became most pronounced for people in their mid-60s onwards, as the greater male death rates at most adult ages resulted in many more women living to become very elderly. In 2007 there were almost three times as many women as men aged 90 or over.
The 2007 age-standardised all-age mortality rates for both males and females are the lowest ever recorded in England and Wales. Between 1997 and 2007 these rates have decreased by 24 per cent for males and 18 per cent for females to 6,957 and 4,926 deaths per million population respectively. In 2007, age standardised death rates had fallen by 2.3 per cent for males and 1.3 per cent for females since 2006.
Source: Mid-2006 and mid-2007 population estimates: Office for National Statistics, General Register Office for Scotland and Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency; Census, April 2001, Office for National Statistics; Census, April 2001, General Register Office for Scotland
Notes: Death rates are a crude death rate which is the total number of all deaths per thousand people in the population, based on deaths registered in the data year.
The age-standardised mortality rates for 2007 are provisional until the release of the 2007 mid-year population estimates in autumn 2008.
Age-standardised rates cover all ages and are directly standardised to the European Standard Population, expressed per million population. They allow comparisons between populations with different age structures, including between males and females and over time.
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