5.9 Gender

More boys are born than girls. At the moment, boys account for 51.1 per cent of all children born in Finland. The figure is similar in other industrialised countries. In China, the proportion of boys is 52.5 per cent and in Pakistan 52.6 per cent. This refers to the gender distribution of population.

The difference between boys and girls is often expressed by examining boys born against 100 girls. Therefore in Finland 104, in China 111 and in Pakistan 112 boys are born per 100 girls.

Although in Finland the male mortality at youth is higher than the female one, men retain their majority in different age groups well into middle age. The reason for this is emigration as women go to live abroad more than men do. Finland had a male majority until the age of 53 in 2000. Women aged 54 were more numerous than men and the female majority grew ever larger with age.

In demography the quantitative differences between genders are described by calculating women per 1,000 men. This is naturally due to the fact that women outlive men. In 2000, Finland had 1,048 women per 1,000 men.

Kuwait is at the other extreme, with just 722 women per 1,000 men. This is the case in many other countries with large quantities of foreign labour - mostly men.