Data Spotlight: Gender gaps across life

Data included in this visualization come from a number of sources:

• Apgar (age 0): National Center for Health Statistics Linked Birth and Infant Data (2022 cohort). The Apgar score, which is measured at 1 and 5 minutes after birth, measures a number of characteristics, such as heart rate and reflexes, and synthesizes each individual measure into a score on a scale of 1 to 10.
• NICU (age 0): National Center for Health Statistics Linked Birth and Infant Data (2022 cohort); this measure represents if an infant was admitted into a neonatal intensive care unit within the first 6 months of life.
• NAEP Math (age 10): National Assessment for Educational Progress 4th Grade Math Assessment (2024); age 10 inferred from the test-takers being in 4th grade
• NAEP Reading (age 10): National Assessment for Educational Progress 4th Grade Reading Assessment (2024); age 10 inferred from the test-takers being in 4th grade
• SAT Math (age 16-18): SAT Suite of Assessments (2025); age 16-18 inferred from average ages when students take the SAT
• SAT ERW (age 16-18): SAT Suite of Assessments (2025); age 16-18 inferred from average ages when students take the SAT
• High School Graduation (age 18): Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR) via National Center for Education Statistics (2023); population counts also collected from the NCES; the AFGR takes cross-sections of an incoming freshman class, and compares that population to the graduating population four years later; due to the nature of this measurement, the AFGR is sensitive to factors such as students transferring schools and students graduating shorter or longer than four years. While this makes the AFGR less robust, national level comparisons between the AFGR and the more robust ACGR track very closely together.
• Employment (age 25): Current Population Survey (CPS) via IPUMS (2025)
• Bachelor’s Degree (age 30): Current Population Survey (CPS) via IPUMS (2025)
• Depression (age 37): CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) (2024); this measure represents whether Americans aged 35 to 39 years-old were “(ever told) ([they] had) a depressive disorder (including depression, major depression, dysthymia, or minor depression)”
• Incarceration (age 39): National Longitudinal Survey; incarceration rates are calculated as the share of 39 year-old individuals that were ever incarcerated in their life.
• Income (age 40): Current Population Survey (CPS) via IPUMS (2025)
• Life Expectancy (Age 65): United States Mortality Tables via Human Mortality Database

To allow for visualization on the same figure and accommodate data limitations, each measure was standardized as follows:

• For continuous variables (e.g., income), the standardized score is calculated as the difference between the male mean and the overall sample mean, divided by the overall sample standard deviation..
• For binary variables (e.g., employment), the standardized score is calculated as the log-odds ratio between the male prevalence and the overall prevalence.

Bars show men’s deviation from the overall sample mean (rather than the direct male–female difference). In approximately balanced samples for continuous variables, this corresponds to roughly half the gender gap; if one gender is overrepresented (e.g., births are ~51% male), the overall mean shifts slightly toward that group, though this effect is minimal in the datasets used here.