Israeli women live longer, study more, earn less than men

There were 3,147,000 women living in Israel at the end of 2003 and the ratio of women to men was 103 to 100. The life expectancy of an Israeli woman is 81.5 years as compared with 77.5 for men, according to figures published by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) to mark International Women's Day today.

There are 104 women to every 100 men among Jewish Israelis, but among the country's Arab population, there are 97 women to 100 men. In the Jewish town of Givatayim, which has an elderly population, there are 114 women to 100 men and in Ramat Gan, 113 women to 100 men, but in the Arab town of Sakhnin, there are only 91 women to every 100 men.

According to CBS figures, fewer girl babies are born than boy babies but, as the years go by, the gap narrows and then the trend changes because of the higher life expectancy of women. At the end of 2003, there were almost 100,000 more women than men over the age of 65 - some 385,000 women as opposed to 285,000 men. Approximately 97,000 of the women were aged 80 or above - but only 64,000 of the men. About 15,000 women and 9,000 men were in their nineties.

Among women aged 65 and above, 51 percent were widows, three times more than the widowers. A mere 3 percent of women aged 65 or over had never married.

Since the 1970s, the average marriage age of women has been steadily climbing in Israel and in 2003 it stood at 24.2, with the first baby being born at age 25.6 on the average. The average for a first marriage in Europe is 28.

The CBS said that there were 895,000 mothers with children under 17 in 2003 - 10 percent of them single parents. Among single mothers, 60 percent were divorced, 12 percent widowed, 13 percent had never married and 15 percent were separated. The average fertility rate in Israel was 2.9, as compared with 1.5 in Europe.

The average wage of a salaried male worker in 2003 was NIS 8,416, while that of a woman was only NIS 5,232 - 62 percent of what their male counterparts earned. A woman earned NIS 36.6 per hour on an average, while a male earned NIS 44.3 on the average.

Only one-third of the country's senior managers were women and a senior woman manager, on the average, earned only 74 percent of the wage earned by an equivalent male. On the average, men in senior managerial positions had the highest income - NIS 74.9, followed by men in academic professions - NIS 70. On the other hand, women in academic professions on the average earned the highest per hour - NIS 57.5, as compared with women in senior managerial positions who received NIS 55.7.The percentage of unemployed women stood at 11.4 percent while the percentage of unemployed men was 9.5 percent.

Only 10 percent of the country's criminals were women.

In the field of education, women were in the lead, with 40 percent of women in 2003 having completed 12 years' schooling, as compared with 39 percent of men. In 2004, there were 134,000 women students at the country's institutes of higher learning but only 105,000 male students.