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Hey, everyone, this is Dmitriy Balkovskiy with an update on demographics and gender imbalance in Russia. The Soviet pop singer at the beginning sings about this exact problem: “potomu chto na desiat devchonok po statistike 9 rebiat” which means «because according to statistics there are only 9 boys to 10 girls”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZW3VMzWmlk
I would imagine that it is the only pop song in existence tackling a demographic problem. But the problem is very real. As of last year there were 79 mln women to 68 mln men in Russia. Or 53.6% to 46.4%.
The situation turns dire for those above 65 – there are more than 25.7 mln women and only 11 mln men. Out of 1000 women above 70 – 668 are widows.
Life expectancy for those born in 2019 will be 78.2 years for women and 68.2 for men.
But men’s life expectancy has grown by about 13 years since the late 1990s and it continues to improve slowly.
One of the major reasons for growing male longevity is that Russians really cut down on their drinking. According to Statista, per capita consumption of pure alcohol of spirits peaked at nearly 9 liters in 1995.
But fast forward to 2016 and you see a vastly different picture. That year, per capita consumption of spirits was just 3.25 liters of pure alcohol.
https://www.statista.com/chart/15918/liters-of-pure-alcohol-consumed-per-capita-in-russia/
But the gender imbalance still remains.