Roughly twice as many women as men are getting vaccinated for Covid-19, according to CNN’s analysis of data from a dozen states that publish demographic information online.
In at least three of these states — Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Nebraska – records that include gender say women account for more than seven in 10 people vaccinated. The percentage of men did not break 39% in any of the states included in CNN’s analysis.
Experts say this may reflect who has been eligible early in the vaccine rollout: health care workers and older adults.
Women represent 76% of full-time health care workers, according to a 2019 report by experts from the US Census Bureau. Life expectancy in 2019 was 76.3 years for men and 81.4 years for women, according to figures from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released last month.
However, national polls have repeatedly shown that women in the general population are slightly less willing to receive a vaccine than men. The reasons for this are “still a bit of a puzzle,” said Cary Funk, director of science and society research at Pew Research Center.
“That level of trust people have in how the vaccine has been developed is strongly related to how likely they are to get the vaccine,” Funk said. “In public opinion surveys, when we’re asking about emerging science and tech developments … we tend to see women a little more cautious or wary of those developments and how they’ll be applied.”
Decades of research have shown that “men and women sometimes approach risk a little bit differently,” she added.
States that publish Covid-19 vaccine demographics and included in CNN’s analysis are: Delaware, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas.