ABSTRACT
The health divide is regarded as one of the major challenges to modern industrial societies. This chapter presents some results on mortality differences among educational groups in Sweden. In general, one of four factors – class, education, income or status – seems to be the obvious choice for an analysis of the health divide. The relative disadvantage associated with compulsory education only is actually greater for women than for men. This is in contrast to what is found when social class is used to measure the health divide, which might indicate that, for women, social class based on one’s own occupation is a less relevant measure of position in the stratification system than is education. Among men, mortality risks decrease systematically with increasing educational level even when the highest levels of education are compared, whereas, among women, we can only detect differences among broad educational levels.
