ABSTRACT
Women's inferior social status influences their mortality not just in the poorest communities of the developing world, but in the most sophisticated urban centers of the industrialized world as well. This chapter examines some salient issues concerning women's mortality at three separate stages of the life cycle: infancy and childhood, the reproductive years, and midlife and older years. Although women who live in countries with high maternal mortality also die more often of other causes than do women in industrialized countries, maternal deaths in developing countries still account for a dramatically higher proportion of all deaths of women in their reproductive years. In affluent countries, the most important causes of death for women are diseases that strike most often in midlife and older age: cardiovascular disease and cancer. Recent studies have documented that gender is often a significant factor in clinical decision making involving heart disease, with men receiving more diagnostic procedures and more aggressive treatment.
