You’d think that more than a century of women’s health advancements would make a difference in the length of women’s lives. But in parts of the U.S. where poverty is wider spread, healthcare is scant and policies are regressive, that isn’t the case.
According to a new study conducted at the Yale School of Public Health, the life expectancy of a woman born in 1900 is nearly the same as a woman born in 2000 in much of the Southern U.S.
In the century that elapsed between 1900 and 2000, life expectancy overall went up for women throughout the country, from 73.8 years to 84.1 years. But when researchers zoomed in to specific states, they found worrying trends in places like Arkansas and West Virginia, where expectancy only rose from 75.7 years to 76.6 years.
Findings were worse in Oklahoma, the team at Yale added – there, rates actually went down.
“Understanding how mortality patterns vary … within each state can inform decision-making around resource allocation and public health interventions,” researchers wrote in the study. And in states where poverty runs rampant and healthcare policies skew regressive – if such protections exist at all – women’s health indeed suffered. And, their lives were shortened.
While individual factors like smoking and recreational drug use were part of the calculus, broader-level factors like access to healthcare and vaccinations significantly influenced mortality rates, too. “Policies related to labor, immigration, civil rights, and the environment” also influenced life expectancy rates from state to state, researchers added.
Other studies have explored this relationship between public policies, healthcare reliability and individual lives, especially women’s lives, as people age. A 2024 report from Forbes revealed, for example, that lack of proper care ends up costing us billions of dollars per year overall.
Experts say it all needs to change – through a range of state- and federal-level overhauls to improve women’s health and outcomes, yes, but also by encouraging medical professionals to do a better job hearing and believing women as patients.
At present, they “feel invisible,” Kristen Helton, CEO of older women’s primary care practice Herself Health, told Forbes in its report. “Every single woman [I’ve spoken with] said, ‘I don’t feel listened to, I don’t feel heard.’”
