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Data

Male-to-female ratio of suicide rate

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Global HealthCauses of Death

About this data

Male-to-female ratio of suicide rate
Age-standardized suicide rate of males divided by the age-standardized suicide rate of females.
Source
World Health Organization (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
July 30, 2024
Date range
2000–2021

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

World Health Organization – Global Health Estimates

WHO's Global Health Estimates (GHE) provide the latest available data on death and disability globally, by region and country, and by age, sex and cause. The latest updates include global, regional and country trends from 2000 to 2021 inclusive. By providing key insights on mortality and morbidity trends, these estimates are a powerful tool to support informed decision-making on health policy and resource allocation.

Methods: WHO's Global Health Estimates present comprehensive and comparable time-series data from 2000 onwards for health-related indicators, including life expectancy, healthy life expectancy, mortality and morbidity, as well as burden of diseases at global, regional and country levels, disaggregated by age, sex and cause.

They are produced using data from multiple consolidated sources, including national vital registration data, latest estimates from WHO technical programmes, United Nations partners and inter-agency groups, as well as the Global Burden of Disease and other scientific studies. A broad spectrum of robust and well-established scientific methods were applied for the processing, synthesis and analysis of data.

Technical report with the full methodology can be found here.

Retrieved on
July 30, 2024
Retrieved from
https://www.who.int/data/global-health-estimates
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Global Health Estimates 2021: Deaths by Cause, Age, Sex, by Country and by Region, 2000-2021. Geneva, World Health Organization; 2024.

WHO's Global Health Estimates (GHE) provide the latest available data on death and disability globally, by region and country, and by age, sex and cause. The latest updates include global, regional and country trends from 2000 to 2021 inclusive. By providing key insights on mortality and morbidity trends, these estimates are a powerful tool to support informed decision-making on health policy and resource allocation.

Methods: WHO's Global Health Estimates present comprehensive and comparable time-series data from 2000 onwards for health-related indicators, including life expectancy, healthy life expectancy, mortality and morbidity, as well as burden of diseases at global, regional and country levels, disaggregated by age, sex and cause.

They are produced using data from multiple consolidated sources, including national vital registration data, latest estimates from WHO technical programmes, United Nations partners and inter-agency groups, as well as the Global Burden of Disease and other scientific studies. A broad spectrum of robust and well-established scientific methods were applied for the processing, synthesis and analysis of data.

Technical report with the full methodology can be found here.

Retrieved on
July 30, 2024
Retrieved from
https://www.who.int/data/global-health-estimates
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Global Health Estimates 2021: Deaths by Cause, Age, Sex, by Country and by Region, 2000-2021. Geneva, World Health Organization; 2024.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

After age-standardizing the suicide rates according to the WHO, we've estimate the ratio between male and female suicide rates.

Age-standardization process is explained here: https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/gho-documents/global-health-estimates/gpe_discussion_paper_series_paper31_2001_age_standardization_rates.pdf

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Male-to-female ratio of suicide rate”, part of the following publication: Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser (2016) - “Global Health”. Data adapted from World Health Organization. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260325-171315/grapher/male-female-ratio-suicides-rates.html [online resource] (archived on March 25, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

World Health Organization (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

World Health Organization (2024) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Male-to-female ratio of suicide rate” [dataset]. World Health Organization, “Global Health Estimates” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260325-171315/grapher/male-female-ratio-suicides-rates.html (archived on March 25, 2026).

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Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/male-female-ratio-suicides-rates.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/male-female-ratio-suicides-rates.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/male-female-ratio-suicides-rates.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/male-female-ratio-suicides-rates.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/male-female-ratio-suicides-rates.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/male-female-ratio-suicides-rates.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/male-female-ratio-suicides-rates.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/male-female-ratio-suicides-rates.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear