Swedish statisticians are predicting that the number of men in the country will soon outweigh the number of women, ending a phenomenon much celebrated by heterosexual men: for centuries there have been considerably more women than men in Sweden. Read the full story

Single Icelandic men spend a lot more time doing household chores than single Icelandic women, a new survey suggests. Read the full story

A new study has revealed that contemporary Danish males have lower levels of testosterone than their fathers. Read the full story

The predicted life expectancy of Icelandic men is the highest in the Nordic countries. In addition to this, Icelandic women come a close second to the Swedes. The predicted life expectancy of a newborn boy in Iceland today is 79.6 years – a Nordic record. Read the full story

Anna Anka, the Swedish-born wife of legendary cabaret singer Paul Anka, has berated Swedish men for their “tragic” house husbandry ways in her column on opinion site Newsmill. Read the full story

New data released by Statistics Iceland suggests that the life expectancy of Icelandic men may be the longest in the world.

A spokesperson for Statistics Iceland, Olof Gardarsdottir, said to the AFP, “This is a world record. They live even longer than Japanese men.”

The average life expectancy of a man in Iceland is 79.4 years, compared to 78.6 years for men in Japan.

“We don’t have an explanation. It’s really difficult to give a reason why,” she said.
Icelandic women are also fairly well-off compared to other countries. Women in Iceland have a life expectance of 82.9 years and Japanese women, according to statistics from the United Nations, live almost 86 years on average.

Together, men and women in Iceland rank higher than France in terms of life expectancy, living an average of just over 81 years in 2007. However, the average person in Japan lives 82 years.

Other countries with high life expectancies include Sweden and Finland. “Historically these countries had an ethic of having more of a nationalised health care system,” says Kate Schecter, a programme officer for the American International Health Alliance. “There’s this mentality that health care should be a given right for citizens.”

Whilst once relying heavily on seafood exports and the fishing industry, Iceland has undergone an economic revolution in recent years. Developments in the financial sector have lead to the Nordic nation becoming one of the world’s richest countries, despite having a population of just over 300,000 people.