Entangled Inequalities: U.S. Trends in Self-Rated Health at the Intersection of Gender and Race, 1972–2018

This study provides a systematic assessment of U.S. differentials in self-rated health over the past five decades (1972–2018) at the intersection of race and gender (i.e., White men, White women, Black men, Black women). In so doing, we provide new evidence regarding racial and gender dynamics in well-being since the civil rights and women’s rights legislations of the 1960s/1970s. We find that self-rated health differentials are converging. Black women experienced a discernable pattern of improvement. In contrast, Black men encountered a variable trend, experiencing self-rated health gains in some decades (i.e., 1990s and 2010s) although experiencing an intermittent reversal of previous gains during the pre-Obama/recession years (i.e., 2000s). While White women experienced self-rated health gains between the 1970s and 2000s, White men experienced little to no change in their health status across the first four decades of the survey. After the economic downturn (2010–2018), however, self-rated health gains among White women diminished, while White men encountered an unparalleled pattern of decline. Our findings contribute to a growing body of work in the United States indicating rapid declines in well-being across a broad range of social indicators of quality of life post-recession. Our findings also closely parallel scholarly work highlighting the well-documented declines in life expectancy and increases in “Deaths of Despair” that have disproportionately and adversely affected the White American (male) population in recent years.