Really interesting point on the trough at 57. I have no idea! That's really quite visible, and would've been around 1967. But there were, to my knowledge, no pa

Really interesting point on the trough at 57. I have no idea! That's really quite visible, and would've been around 1967. But there were, to my knowledge, no particularly major events around then, in the USSR, that could easily explain it. On the gender imbalance, men just tend to die younger than women. As a funny (?) factoid, evolution/nature also somehow optimizes for this. There's about 107 boys born for every 100 girls. [1] But after we get done getting ourselves killed in all sorts of creative ways, you end up with a sex ratio that's almost exactly 50:50 across all ages; at older ages you end with a sex ratio skewed towards women. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_ratio