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xchrom

(108,903 posts)
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 07:23 AM Apr 2013

This Map Of US Female Mortality Will Break Your Heart

http://www.businessinsider.com/us-female-life-expectancy-mortality-2013-4

n a speech at the Women In The World summit Friday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mentioned a startling fact:

Women in the U.S. are living shorter lives than women in almost every other industrialized country. And worse yet, female mortality rates are actually rising in many parts of the country.

"Think about it for a minute. We are the richest and most powerful country in the world," Clinton said. "Yet many American women today are living shorter lives than their mothers, especially those with the least education. That is a historic reversal that rivals the decline in life expectancy for Russian men after the disintegration of the Soviet Union."

We looked into Clinton's claims, and it appears she is correct.

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This Map Of US Female Mortality Will Break Your Heart (Original Post) xchrom Apr 2013 OP
That map looks familiar. Skinner Apr 2013 #1
It really is pretty striking, isn't it? mainer Apr 2013 #20
You can see that clearly in FL Sekhmets Daughter Apr 2013 #27
It shows up in other ways too Major Nikon Apr 2013 #33
Could it be because they are working more than the last generation? Bonobo Apr 2013 #2
That's part of it... GoCubsGo Apr 2013 #6
The places on the map where women have professional jobs shows "steady improvement." yardwork Apr 2013 #8
Yes, that makes sense. Bonobo Apr 2013 #9
The suggestion that women are only now beginning to work is insulting and false. yardwork Apr 2013 #15
You think that the number of women that work has not increased? Bonobo Apr 2013 #16
"Being on someone else's payroll or not" is not the same thing MadrasT Apr 2013 #19
So obvious it hurts. DURHAM D Apr 2013 #21
I agree in general with your statements, but would like to add DebJ Apr 2013 #30
Thank you for this post BrotherIvan Apr 2013 #32
But she wasn't bringing home a paycheck Le Taz Hot Apr 2013 #34
The map seems to refute your argument. Better health is correlated with working outside the home. yardwork Apr 2013 #22
I live in Japan and yes, men work themselves to death Bonobo Apr 2013 #23
I totally misunderstood. I thought that was a map of the US! yardwork Apr 2013 #24
I give up. Bonobo Apr 2013 #25
the red areas you see have a great amount of unemployment and poverty bettyellen Apr 2013 #31
Clinton didn't do much research. McDiggy Apr 2013 #3
Those two maps don't match up well. aandegoons Apr 2013 #5
Classic findings of an ecologic fallacy... Sure it can explain SOME of the findings... hlthe2b Apr 2013 #14
Excellent! I found a similar map but with colors matching the map in the OP Buzz Clik Apr 2013 #28
K&R Jamastiene Apr 2013 #4
Obesity, Guns? smirkymonkey Apr 2013 #7
I feel the same way about living in New Haven. Yale-New Haven Hospital right down CTyankee Apr 2013 #11
Wow! Good luck! JNelson6563 Apr 2013 #10
It's interesting that it looks better in NY and Cali ... ProfessionalLeftist Apr 2013 #12
Seems like the problem is worst where women are seen as baby making appliances. Not that shocking. Squinch Apr 2013 #13
K&R redqueen Apr 2013 #17
Interesting that there is so much blue along our southern border... truebluegreen Apr 2013 #18
We also Tree-Hugger Apr 2013 #26
Not about work Brooklyn Girl Apr 2013 #29
Good first post Le Taz Hot Apr 2013 #35

mainer

(12,013 posts)
20. It really is pretty striking, isn't it?
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 10:28 AM
Apr 2013

The progressive areas are doing well. Conservative areas are women-killers.

Sekhmets Daughter

(7,515 posts)
27. You can see that clearly in FL
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 11:45 AM
Apr 2013

where the traditionally Democratic counties show 'substantial improvement' on this map!

Bonobo

(29,257 posts)
2. Could it be because they are working more than the last generation?
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 07:27 AM
Apr 2013

Everyone knows that men die earlier. Could it be that now that women are now working nearly as much as men and experiencing all the stress that comes from it, that that is the reason?

GoCubsGo

(32,061 posts)
6. That's part of it...
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 07:45 AM
Apr 2013

...along with shitty diets that lead to obesity. Add to that unaffordable health care to treat the obesity, and a rollback on women's health choices. Probably more vehicle deaths than most places, too, and definitely more deaths by firearm.

yardwork

(61,415 posts)
8. The places on the map where women have professional jobs shows "steady improvement."
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 07:53 AM
Apr 2013

Look at the dark blue areas. Those communities are where women's health has improved. All the urban areas are represented. It's in the deep rural parts of the country, including Appalachia and the rural south and west, where women's mortality has increased. Poor women in those regions have always worked. Their mothers worked, hard work. Women in those communities are still working and now they're dying earlier. Lack of access to decent healthcare and the nationwide epidemic of obesity is probably the reason.

By the way, it's very disappointing to see how ugly things have gotten about women's rights.

Bonobo

(29,257 posts)
9. Yes, that makes sense.
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 07:57 AM
Apr 2013

The men vs. women arguments here though are not, I think, about women's rights.

They are mostly substance-free fights where one side picks on someone and there are counterstrikes (both sides).

If we only discussed issues and avoided the bullshit rhetoric, I think there would be no fights at all. Maybe that wouldn't be interesting enough for some.

yardwork

(61,415 posts)
15. The suggestion that women are only now beginning to work is insulting and false.
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 09:07 AM
Apr 2013

I work, support myself, and pay half the college expenses and living expenses of my sons. My mother worked. My grandmother worked. My great-grandmother worked harder than any of us. She ran a farm with her husband. The farm had no electricity. My great-great grandmother ran the farm before them, before their were trucks or cars or electricity or indoor plumbing. My female ancestors worked on farms and ran small businesses. They worked as hard as the men in their families.

Bonobo

(29,257 posts)
16. You think that the number of women that work has not increased?
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 09:14 AM
Apr 2013

I would bet that if you compared the percentage of woman working now to that of 40 years ago, it has gone up. Alot.

Want to bet?

MadrasT

(7,237 posts)
19. "Being on someone else's payroll or not" is not the same thing
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 10:00 AM
Apr 2013

as "working or not".

Let's take my grandmother for example. She had 7 children and worked from morning until night.

Wake the children, dress the children, feed the children, send the older ones to school.

Wash the dishes, dry the dishes, clean the house.

Feed the children. Change the babies.

Do laundry in a machine that had an automatic agitator, but required every piece to be run through a ringer to squeeze the extra water out. Hang the laundry. Go back later and take down the laundry and fold the laundry. Every day.

Care for an aging mother-in-law who lived with them.

Sew/mend clothes for 10 people. And take in mending for other people to make a few extra pennies.

Prepare dinner. Wash dishes, dry dishes, put away dishes.

Breathe for an hour.

Get the children off to bed.

She wasn't on anyone's payroll, but she worked her ass off from morning til night nearly every day of her life.

The her husband left her, with 4 kids still at home, and she had to take another job OUTSIDE the house to bring in $$$. (Is that when she "started working"? I think not.)

I'd say her stress level was pretty high, what with the abusive alcoholic philandering husband who spent all his money buying rounds at the local tavern, no money for medical care for the kids, and never knowing how they'd keep the electric on, and never a moment to call her own.

But women have only recently started to "work".

DebJ

(7,699 posts)
30. I agree in general with your statements, but would like to add
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 11:54 AM
Apr 2013

something to them. Would you agree that for most women, working outside of the home is not physical labor,
but rather, offers an additional and different type of stress to the system. Then, when the women get home,
they still have to do all of the 'traditional' chores as well. As a working single Mom for 20 years, I like many working
Moms had to move from the stress of a bad work situation (and add in underpaid to that stress), fight the traffic home
in terror of not getting to daycare on time, then begin work again at 6pm, doing all the household chores, homework,
child care, staying up all night with a sick child but still get up at 6am for another day, with no way to nap or even sit
down or rest, but rather, to face again the stress from some corporate idiot who didn''t have a clue what was going on.
The stress was never-ending for 20 years. No time to enjoy myself, watch TV, read a book, or chat with a neighbor.
No time at all ever to unwind, recuperate, take a breath. Just constant, constant, constant demands. So constant, that
when my children were grown and I had remarried, and things had settled down, someone asked me this: if you could do anything
at all to enjoy yourself, what would you do? i couldn't answer that question. Just couldn't think of anything at all. Because
for twenty years, nothing I ever wanted or needed was of consequence nor had any shot at all of happening. So I had
ceased to dream. All I could think of was: sleep undisrupted. Sit in quiet. Not have to do something on the job I knew would
actually hurt the company just because some ignorant butthead up the line required it to be done. Rest, and peace, were all
I could think of. I still struggle with this to some extent.

When you cease to dream, you cease to live.

Also, my grandmother lived in an era when people ate REAL food, from scratch. Women of this era have spent their lives eating
a huge amount of crap, sugar, sodium, fat, preservatives, artificial coloring. Read the label of a bottle of ranch dressing and you may
never eat it again. On top of that, our bodies are filled with pollution. I read one time that the breast milk of African mothers who live in tribal villages far out from modern civilization contains chemicals found in synthetic wall-to-wall carpet. These things are all biological stressors that our ancestors bodies did not have to deal with, on top of the stress of daily living, which, as I said above, is
now non-stop 24/7 for many women. My great-great-grandma had a very difficult life. But she also could be there to comfort a sick child, be there to enjoy her children and hold them and watch them grow, have some real time with them instead of just trying to get tasks done all night and all weekend. Today's life can rob most of the rewards for all that work. It is isolating, too. Too busy to have good times with friends except on a rare occasion. In my grandma's day, neighbors really knew each other.

None of that explains the red-blue pattern, but I wanted to say there is a difference in what women must do today, and what they did back then. I do Ancestry research, and I read the details of my foremothers lives, and that inspires courage in my own life difficulties. But they did have the comfort of time with family, and time to chat with the grocer or the neighbor, and other little bits of life that are something OTHER than work.

BrotherIvan

(9,126 posts)
32. Thank you for this post
Sun Apr 7, 2013, 03:12 AM
Apr 2013

So true. The never-ending stress is just too much sometimes. I hope you find some quiet time to care of yourself and someone gives you some love flowers just because.

yardwork

(61,415 posts)
22. The map seems to refute your argument. Better health is correlated with working outside the home.
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 10:49 AM
Apr 2013

In a capitalist economy where access to healthcare must be purchased and is linked to having a full-time permanent job with benefits, it is beneficial to have a professional job.

In the map's blue regions, women's health status has improved "substantially." Look at the map. The blue regions are major metropolitan areas where women's work is mostly outside the home, where women are earning paychecks and have access to employee-subsidized private health insurance.

The red regions on the map are rural areas. Employment is lower in these communities. Women have less access to paychecks there, not more. They are still working - women have always worked - but women in these regions are working at low-paying, part-time jobs that don't provide health insurance.

And again, the suggestion that having a paycheck is what determines whether a woman is "working" or not is insulting and false. The women working in the red areas are doing back-breaking work that wears out their bodies. My grandmother told me that she left the farm because the work was so hard. Our office jobs are cushy compared to that - and we get paychecks, benefits, and health insurance.

Bonobo

(29,257 posts)
23. I live in Japan and yes, men work themselves to death
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 11:13 AM
Apr 2013

It is called "karoshi". Men have traditionally worked harder, more back-breaking labor that kills them early. It is a fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karōshi

Karōshi (過労死?), which can be translated literally from Japanese as "death from overwork", is occupational sudden death. Although this category has a significant count, Japan is one of the few countries[which?] that reports it in the statistics as a separate category. The major medical causes of karōshi deaths are heart attack and stroke due to stress.
The first case of karōshi was reported in 1969 with the death from a stroke of a 29-year-old male worker in the shipping department of Japan's largest newspaper company.[1] It was not until the later part of the 1980s, during the Bubble Economy, however, when several high-ranking business executives who were still in their prime years suddenly died without any previous sign of illness, that the media began picking up on what appeared to be a new phenomenon. This new phenomenon was quickly labeled karōshi and was immediately seen as a new and serious menace for people in the work force. In 1987, as public concern increased, the Japanese Ministry of Labour began to publish statistics on karōshi.
Japan's rise from the devastation of World War II to economic prominence in the post-war decades has been regarded as the trigger for what has been called a new epidemic. It was recognized that employees cannot work for twelve or more hours a day, six or seven days a week, year after year, without suffering physically as well as mentally. A recent measurement found that a Japanese worker has approximately two hours overtime a day on average.[citation needed] It is common for the overtime to go unpaid.

yardwork

(61,415 posts)
24. I totally misunderstood. I thought that was a map of the US!
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 11:24 AM
Apr 2013

I thought that this thread is about changes in women's health in the U.S. over time. I had no idea that that is a map of Japan! My eyes must be going from all this work on a computer.

Bonobo

(29,257 posts)
25. I give up.
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 11:35 AM
Apr 2013

It is not worth it.

But I never said women did not work. I said the number of women that work outside the home has increased. It has.

 

bettyellen

(47,209 posts)
31. the red areas you see have a great amount of unemployment and poverty
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 01:01 PM
Apr 2013

and the blue, and much higher percentage of women in the work force.

And women's work - child and elder care is pretty darned stressful. Especially when you factor in there was little choice about those things. Having six kids and being expected to deal with it all, and caring for sick parents, all without help or partnership (because men "work&quot is really really hard. You can't punch out at five and get a beer. Having little autonomy is very stressful.

McDiggy

(150 posts)
3. Clinton didn't do much research.
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 07:32 AM
Apr 2013

Compare:
[img][/img]
to
[img][/img]


-----

Really, its pretty easy to explain. America is fat and getting fatter.

aandegoons

(473 posts)
5. Those two maps don't match up well.
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 07:37 AM
Apr 2013

To make such a correlation the deepest blues and the deepest reds as a minimum should match up. They just don't.

hlthe2b

(101,714 posts)
14. Classic findings of an ecologic fallacy... Sure it can explain SOME of the findings...
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 08:48 AM
Apr 2013

Last edited Sat Apr 6, 2013, 09:43 AM - Edit history (1)

But it clearly is not the sole causal explanation. The second age-adjusted obesity map includes men, btw. Major flaw in your hypothesis--even for trying to promote an ecologic correlation.

 

Buzz Clik

(38,437 posts)
28. Excellent! I found a similar map but with colors matching the map in the OP
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 11:46 AM
Apr 2013


It's not a 1:1 correlation, but the trend is undeniable.
 

smirkymonkey

(63,221 posts)
7. Obesity, Guns?
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 07:49 AM
Apr 2013

Thank god I live in Boston. Right next to Mass General Hospital, the best hospital in the country. If I do get sick, I am in good hands.

CTyankee

(63,769 posts)
11. I feel the same way about living in New Haven. Yale-New Haven Hospital right down
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 08:16 AM
Apr 2013

the road from me...

ProfessionalLeftist

(4,982 posts)
12. It's interesting that it looks better in NY and Cali ...
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 08:27 AM
Apr 2013

... the "liberal" bookends ends of the country, so-to-speak.

Looks like Southern states are horrible overall. More poverty there.

Squinch

(50,773 posts)
13. Seems like the problem is worst where women are seen as baby making appliances. Not that shocking.
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 08:38 AM
Apr 2013

Texas is going to be a lot redder after Perry's Planned Parenthood cuts have a chance to work.

 

truebluegreen

(9,033 posts)
18. Interesting that there is so much blue along our southern border...
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 09:46 AM
Apr 2013

Many of those are not "well-educated" centers. Do you suppose that is because immigrant women are living longer than their mothers? I don't really understand how the study was conducted...

Tree-Hugger

(3,364 posts)
26. We also
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 11:42 AM
Apr 2013

Have a high maternal mortality rate compared to other developed countries. I'm mobile, so I don't have a access to links, but I think we rank poorly when it comes to maternal death. A lot of those red areas also have shitty maternity systems.

Brooklyn Girl

(1 post)
29. Not about work
Sat Apr 6, 2013, 11:52 AM
Apr 2013
“We did find significant associations between mortality rates and some of these factors, such as smoking rates for both sexes," Kindig and Cheng wrote. "But socioeconomic factors such as the percentage of a county’s population with a college education and the rate of children living in poverty had equally strong or stronger relationships to fluctuations in mortality rates.”

This isn't about women working harder than their mothers or grandmothers did. This also isn't a comparison between men and women. We have a lot of poor, uneducated people in this country. We have too many people who don't have access to health care; we consume too many kinds of food that are contaminated or just plain junk; we have too many obese people who either don't eat well, don't get enough exercise, or both; and too many people who don't have access to fresh, healthy food or simply don't know how to choose it, an ignorance that advertisers are more than happy to exploit. More than half of them are women.
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