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A global decline in smoking masks regional variations between the sexes

In some places women are taking up the habit even as men quit

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Apr 6th 2017by THE DATA TEAM

THE scientific evidence that smoking kills was first made public in the 1960s. Yet people continue to light up—even if fewer do so than before. According to new estimates in the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) study published in the Lancet, the global prevalence of men who smoke daily fell from 35% in 1990 to 25% in 2015; the prevalence among women dropped from 8.2% to 5.4%. Men tend to puff more for cultural reasons. Cigarette adverts are more likely to target them and in some countries female smoking is considered a taboo.

However, this global decline masks wide regional variations in smoking between the sexes. Smoking rates among women increased in 43 countries compared with 35 for men. The biggest falls for both sexes are mainly in rich countries, which have introduced tobacco controls such as smoking bans and high taxation on cigarettes.

Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Iceland have all seen a reduction in the overall smoking rate by ten percentage points since 1990. But in much of Europe—unlike most of the world—around the same share of women smoke as men.

Elsewhere, men in Asia and women in eastern Europe in particular are failing to stub out the habit. The highest rates of smoking are in Asia: around half of all men smoke daily in Indonesia and Laos, and their rates have barely budged since 1990. Only a small fraction of women smoke in those countries, but more are taking it up. Timor-Leste saw the highest percentage rise in smoking, from 4% of women to 12%.

The stakes are high. Some 6.4m people died from smoking-related causes in 2015, of whom a fifth were women, according to the GBD. In many countries that proportion is only likely to increase.