GBD Sex Differences

Explore patterns of differences between females and males in the world’s health levels and trends from 1990 to 2023 using updated data from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study in this interactive tool. Use maps and treemaps, arrow diagrams, and many other charts to compare the burden of health outcomes between females and males globally, within and across seven super-regions and 204 countries, and analyze these patterns by age. Learn how the balance of fatal and non-fatal disease burden may differ between females and males, which health outcomes have a disproportionate toll on either sex, and what countries are getting close to narrowing the differences between the two groups.

This visualization presents the rates of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and deaths by age, sex, location, and year, and the corresponding relative and absolute differences between female and male rates. The relative difference is the proportional difference in disease burden between the two groups, calculated as (female rate – male rate) divided by male rate. The absolute difference is the female rate minus the male rate. For both measures, negative values correspond to outcomes where the disease burden among males is greater than that among females and vice versa for positive values.