Long-standing illness or health problem by sex (annual, Europe)

Annual share of the population aged 16 and over reporting a long-standing illness or health problem, broken down by sex, for EU member states, EFTA countries, EU candidate countries and EU/euro-area aggregates. Eurostat dataset hlth_silc_11 ('People having a long-standing illness or health problem, by sex, age and income quintile'), filtered to unit=PC ('Percentage'), quant_inc=TOTAL ('Total'), age=Y_GE16 ('16 years or over') and sex=M/F ('Males' / 'Females'). It extends the headline dataset 'longstanding-illness-annual' (the sex=T slice of the same table). Each row is one (year, country, sex): women report a long-standing illness or health problem at higher rates than men in the large majority of published country-years (e.g. FRA 2025: 43.8% F vs 39.4% M; DEU 2025: 39.1% F vs 35.3% M). Method and caveats as the headline dataset; non-EU/EFTA/candidate countries are dropped (same licensing rule). Units: percent of the 16+ population of the sex group. Coverage: 44 geographic units after the geo rule, 2008 to the present, annual. Provenance: Eurostat keyless JSON-stat API, free reuse with attribution (Commission Decision 2011/833/EU) - please cite Eurostat. Primary key: (year, country_code, sex). Join keys: country_code (ISO 3166-1 alpha-3), year, sex. Cadence: refreshed yearly; Eurostat publishes the series each autumn. Sample use: filter sex='F' to track women's self-reported chronic-illness prevalence across countries.