Racial gap in life expectancy narrowed since 1990 but remains large

Key takeaways:

• Life expectancy rose between 1.7 to 7.9 years among white and Black Americans from 1990 to 2018.
• White men were still expected to live up to 5.2 years longer than Black men in 2018.

Differences in life expectancy between Black and white Americans decreased in the decades leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, a new brief report revealed.

However, substantial disparities continue to persist even with the gains, while further research is necessary “to understand the importance of structural racism (and other factors) as drivers of variations in Black and white life expectancy across states,” the researchers noted.

The data come after previous research indicated that the life expectancy gap in the United States increased to over 20 years across various demographic groups from 2001 to 2021. Another recent analysis showed that life expectancy gains in the U.S. have stalled in comparison to those of other developed countries.

Timothy A. Waidmann, PhD, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, and colleagues explained that gaps in life expectancy are large, but some studies have suggested that “they are smaller than they have been in the past.”

In the current analysis, the researchers examined changes in life expectancy among Black men, Black women, white men and white women that occurred from 1990 to 2018 using individual death certificate data.

They found that during that time, Black men, white men, Black women and white women experienced increases of 7.9 years, 3.7 years, 5.4 years and 1.7 years in life expectancy, respectively, while the gap in life expectancy between Black and white individuals decreased.

Yet, the average life expectancy for Black individuals in 2018 was less than that among white individuals by:

• 5.2 years for men; and
• 3.1 years for women.

Waidmann and colleagues noted that this gap was evident across all states, although the differences significantly varied across states by each race and sex category. For instance, there was a 16.5-year difference in life expectancy for white men between the District of Columbia (86.2 years) and West Virginia (69.7 years).

Only the District of Columbia and Wisconsin saw the life expectancy gap between Black and white women widen during the study period, whereas the gap was reduced by 5 years or more in Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and Tennessee.

Black men made substantially larger life expectancy gains vs. white men in every state over the study period, whereas the gap between these populations closed between 5 to 14 years in Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island.

The researchers explained that the variations in inequities observed “suggest there are several factors involved, including structural racism.”

They also added that it is unsurprising that substantial gaps in life expectancy still exist even with the gains made as “many contemporary policies and practices (eg, home appraisal practices) still lead to an inequitable distribution of health-promoting resources despite appearing facially race-neutral.”

For future research, “we plan to leverage spatiotemporal variation in a wide variety of indicators of exposure to racism that is observable at multiple levels and across multiple health care, policy, and social domains to identify the factors with the greatest impact on racial inequities in health,” Waidmann and colleagues concluded.