Men live shorter lives and carry a greater burden of disease than women across the world, and the gap is widest among men who face social and economic disadvantage. That is the central finding of a new paper in The Lancet that offers a global epidemiological overview of men's health within an intersectional framework.
The authors analysed mortality and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), a measure that combines years of life lost to early death with years lived with disability. The data come from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Studies and cover the period from 1990 to 2023. Across that span, males have consistently shown lower life expectancies and higher DALY totals than females, and the most severe outcomes appear among males living in marginalised contexts.
The paper is built around intersectionality, the idea that health is shaped by overlapping factors such as sex, economic position, place and social circumstance rather than by any single characteristic. Applying this lens allows the authors to show that men's health is not uniform. Outcomes vary considerably within the male population, and those who are marginalised carry the heaviest share of the burden. Drawing attention to that variation is the paper's main purpose, and the authors argue that averages calculated for men as a single group obscure the groups most in need.
The work forms part of a Lancet series on men's health, and its authors intend it as the epidemiological foundation for the rest of the series. Rather than isolating one cause or proposing a single intervention, the paper illustrates how health differs among men and sets out the key themes that emerge from the data. Those themes are meant to frame the discussion that follows in the other articles of the series.
For public health researchers and policymakers, the findings point to a practical problem. If men's health is assessed only through broad, sex-based comparisons, the disadvantage faced by specific groups of men can be missed. Groups experiencing the greatest social and economic hardship account for some of the largest losses in life expectancy and healthy years, which suggests that data collection and programme design need to capture social context as well as sex.
The paper also places men's health alongside women's, rather than treating it as a separate issue. Because men's lower life expectancy is measured against female outcomes in the same datasets, the comparison highlights a consistent gap across decades rather than a temporary trend. The 1990–2023 period gives the authors a long run of comparable estimates, allowing them to describe patterns that persist over more than three decades rather than reflecting a single year's events.
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