The most male and female reasons to end up hospital 🚑

In which some stereotypes are resoundingly confirmed

The first post I wrote for this blog was about people being injured by dogs. Specifically, how much of this goes on, and what counts as a lot.

We can measure this reasonably well in England, because the health service publishes annual data for hospital admissions showing what people were admitted for.

This often includes not just the physical condition that needed treatment, but the event that led to that condition in the first place. So not just the tissue damage on someone’s hand, in other words, but the story of a dog bite behind it.

These second-order reasons for admission—known as “external causes”—cover a whole world of horrible mishaps beyond the ones that I looked at last time. The data also records whether the patient was male or female, so I wondered what the most male and most female external causes might be.

To cut to the chase, here they are.

When I began the crunching that produced these numbers, I’d given no thought at all to what I would find. If I had, it would have been obvious that pregnancy would top the charts on the female side.

But I don’t think I could have imagined what a stark dossier of male and female stereotypes I was compiling. Because to me, the chart above basically says that violence, physical labour, sport and machines are the most typically male ways to end up in hospital, while pregnancy, beauty and animals and mental health are the most typically female.

I’m having to choose my words carefully, because I need to stress one thing: these are not the most common reasons for men and women to be admitted to hospital. They are the most typically male and typically female.

So only about 400 men in the whole of England go to hospital after falls from scaffolding each year. But that cause is at the top of the chart because it is the reason for admission that’s most male-dominated—just as the various pregnancy-related reasons are the most female. (I’ve put the total number of admissions in the column on the right, to give an actual sense of scale.)

In practice, I’d guess that these causes are the things that men or women do more often, or more dangerously.

Some minor points: I excluded all the external causes with less than 1,000 admissions in the last three years, so everything you see here happens at least fairly frequently, and amounts to a reasonable sample. I also excluded a small number of admissions (less than half a percent) that are classified “Gender Unknown”.

Some of the external causes have very longwinded names, so I’ve made them as simple as possible. “Agents primarily acting on smooth and skeletal muscles and the respiratory system” is especially unenlightening, although I suspect it might have something to do with Botox.

In the next few days I plan to upload all the data in a searchable table (if I can make that work) so you can explore it in other ways too.

UPDATE: You can now find the data in this follow-up post.