24th-October-2007
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October 24, 2007
Women in the top social class in England and Wales are now likely to live to 85.1 years, up two and a half years in only four years, according to new statistics published today.
The soaring life expectancy for professional women or those who marry into the Social Class 1 has increased at a faster trend than previous years, according to figures published by the Office for National Statistics.
However the surprising data also suggests that the gap between the professional class and the lowest unskilled class in women at least has widened since the last data was published four years ago.
The figures show that the life expectancy at birth for women in the top social class, which includes doctors, lawyers and accountants, or those married to them, jumped from 82.6 years in 2001 to 85.1 years in 2005.
But during the same period the life expectancy for women in the lowest social class - unskilled workers and labourers - only rose from 77.9 to 78.1 years, an increase of only ten weeks.
Men have been catching up with women over the last thirty 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, an increase of just six months. At the same time the life span for unskilled workers rose from 71.5 to 72.7 years, an increase of 1 year and 10 weeks.
Brian Johnson, a spokesman for the ONS, said 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 blip.
The 2001 figures themselves showed 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 was more reliable he said.
Taking the period as a whole from 1972 to 2005 the figures show that both males and females in non-manual occupations had a greater increase in life expectancy at birth at at age 64 than those classified to manual occupations.
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