Population of Italy 1871-2020, by gender

This statistic shows the total population of men and women in Italy from 1871 until 2015. From the graph we can see that the total number of women was actually lower than the total number of men in the late 1800s, and it was only at the turn of the twentieth century that a margin appeared and the number of men grew at a lower rate than the number of women. At the turn of the twentieth century there were 16.2 million men, and 16.3 million women. From this point onwards the difference begins to grow. The margin narrows again in the interwar years, where the number of women exceeds the number of men by less than 800,000, however this gap grows to over 1.2 million in 1950. Although Italy was heavily involved in the Second World War and subsequent civil war, where many populations (particularly the male populations) experienced a large decline, we cannot see the effects of the war on Italy's population from this graph. From 1950 onwards the margin stays between 1.2 and 1.8 million throughout the rest of Italy's history, and both populations grow very similarly, until 2020 where the population of men is just under 29.5 million and the population of women is just over 31 million, with the number of women dropping in the last five years whereas the number of men has increased.