I want to know what percentage of females born in 1916 in the United
States are still alive today. This will necessarily be an estimate,
but the information should be available somewhere.

rbuck-ga,

The answer is almost exactly 25%.

That is, one out four women born in 1916 are still alive today.


The figure comes from authoritative statistics maintained by the
National Center for Health Statistics:


http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/Default.htm
National Center for Health Statistics


In particular, the NCHS has published a table of life expectancies by
age and gender, which can be seen here:


http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr53/nvsr53_06.pdf
Table B. Number of survivors by age, out of 100,000 born alive, by
race and sex: United States, 2002


The table shows that, for every 100,000 women who were born 90 years
ago, 25,411 are still alive.

[NOTE that the data was derived in 2002, but there's no reason to
suppose that it has changed greatly in the past few years.  That is,
there is still a 25% rate of survivorship for those who are currently
90 year olds and who were born in 1916].


I trust this information is just what you needed.

However, please do not rate this answer if you have any further
questions, or need any additional information.  Just post a Request
for Clarification to let me know how I can assist you, and I'm at your
service.


All the best,

pafalafa-ga


search strategy -- Searched the bookmarked NCHS site for [ life expectancy ]

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Request for Answer Clarification by rbuck-ga on 04 Mar 2006 21:47 PST

Thanks very much for that percentage. Do you know how many females
were born in 1916?

---

Clarification of Answer by pafalafa-ga on 12 Mar 2006 14:08 PST

rbuck-ga,

I'll try to answer your follow-up question as best I can, though
detailed statistics from the early 1900's are hard to come by.

According to this historical record of births from the Census Bureau:


http://www.census.gov/statab/hist/HS-13.pdf
Live Births, Deaths, Infant Deaths, and Maternal Deaths:  1900 to 2001


there was a total of 2,964,000 births in the US in 1916.


Since births are generally divided pretty evenly between males and
females, we can use this number to surmise that there were 1,482,000
female babies born in 1916.


Hope that's what you needed.


paf

Thanks very much.