Societal restraint of behavior during the pre-vaccine pandemic saved working-age men but not women.

Risky behavior disproportionately contributes to death in the working-age (i.e., 15 to 64 years old) population. Men exhibit riskier behavior than do women. As a result, working-age men die more frequently than do working-age women. Despite these circumstances, surprisingly little research has attempted to estimate the gender-specific efficacy of societal restraint of risky behavior. This study provides such estimations by exploiting differences among the Nordic countries in the dose of forced restraint adopted to reduce mortality in the pre-vaccine COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that relatively great restraint reduced the likelihood of death among working-age men but not among working-age women. The findings suggest that debate over the wisdom of forced restraint of behavior as a strategy to reduce deaths should reflect the likely divergent effects of such interventions on working-age men and women.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  Science Advances

• Publication date

  2025-11-28

• Fields of study

  Sociology, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1126/sciadv.ady7033PMID 41296864
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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