Smoking equality

A study of tobacco smoking patterns reports that more men than women smoke in every country except Sweden. In some nations, the smoking disparity between the sexes is large. But smoking is on the rise among women in some countries, especially in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. The biggest increases in smoking among women from 1980 to 2012 were in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Tunisia.

Globally, smoking rates declined over this period, dropping from 41 percent to 31 percent in men and from nearly 11 percent to 6 percent in women. But because of population growth, the total number of daily smokers increased from 721 million to 967 million.