Data sources

Which country you are drawn into, and most of what follows: life expectancy, sex at birth, literacy, employment, income and how it is shared out, how many people live in the country and how many children women there have on average, electricity, water, sanitation, handwashing, internet access, the age people there marry at and the share of women married before eighteen, and the circumstances of the birth itself.

Used under CC BY 4.0.

The odds of surviving the first year and the first five, which is the only figure on the site that decides whether there is an adult life to describe. It is read through the World Bank rather than from the group directly, so the World Bank's licence is the one that applies.

Used under CC BY 4.0.

The development score shown on every life, and the band it sits in.

Used under CC BY 3.0 IGO.

Height, body mass index and adult overweight. Height comes from the 2016 paper in eLife and body mass from the 2026 one in Nature, which is why the two cover slightly different countries. Both papers are published under CC BY; the data files themselves carry no licence, and we have written to ask under what terms they may be used.

How many children someone has by their early thirties. It is built from the rates at which women in that country give birth at each age up to 34, added together, rather than from the number of children a woman there has over a whole lifetime.

Used under CC BY 3.0 IGO.

Whether someone married, and whether they are single, divorced or widowed. This one carries no licence we can point at, and we have written to ask for one.

Ethnic and religious composition, country by country, in each country's own census categories. The Factbook closed in February 2026, so this is read from a public mirror of its final data rather than from the CIA.

Used under Public domain.

The cities, how many people live in them, and their coordinates.

Used under CC BY 4.0.

The map tiles behind the birth city marker. A map is two things under two licences: the data underneath is ODbL, and the pictures drawn from it are CC BY-SA 2.0. This page used to name only the first.

Used under ODbL and CC BY-SA 2.0.

Every line in the legal standing table: whether same-sex relationships are legal, and what protection or recognition exists. The underlying dataset is Kristopher Velasco's LGBTI National Policy Dataset, which Our World in Data asks be cited alongside it. The licence below covers what Our World in Data did with that dataset, and not the dataset itself; Our World in Data says so, and this page used to claim otherwise.

Used under CC BY 4.0.

Real name frequencies for four countries. Everywhere else, common names come from Wikipedia's country lists, and about ninety countries have names written for this project with no published source at all. Ireland and Norway publish theirs under CC BY 4.0; the Wikipedia lists are CC BY-SA 4.0, which asks that anything built on them be shared the same way.

Used under CC BY 4.0 and CC BY-SA 4.0.

Contains Irish Public Sector Data licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.

The single global rate a person's sexual orientation is drawn from. It is not applied per country, because per-country figures do not exist for most of the world.

The fifteen questions about women and the law, answered for the country a woman was born in: whether she can take a job, travel, inherit, divorce, own property or run a business on the same terms as a man, and whether the law protects her at work and at home. These are answers about what is written down. Whether a law is applied, and what living under it is like, are not things this or any other dataset here can say.

Used under CC BY 4.0.

World Bank. 2026. "Women, Business and the Law" [dataset]. Washington, DC: World Bank.

The photographs of a real home shown beside a person's income: photographs of everyday homes in 63 countries, each family recorded with what the household lives on per month. Gapminder resizes the pictures itself and names the photographer beside every one, and both are why a home can be shown here at all. Every life born in one of those 63 countries is shown a home, and where no photographed family lives on about the same income, the nearest one is shown and said to be the nearest. The two figures are not the same measurement: Dollar Street states what each family has to spend per adult, from asking the family, and the income figure elsewhere on this site is a national total divided by everyone alive. In poorer countries the two can differ by several times.

Used under CC BY 4.0.

The monthly income figure for a small number of countries whose national accounts publish none, Nigeria and South Sudan among them. It is the average of the household survey itself, the same survey the inequality figure beside it already came from, and only where that survey is recent enough to describe someone alive now. It is not the same measurement as the figure other countries carry: a survey asks a sample of households what they spend, and everywhere else here a national total is divided by everyone alive. The methodology page explains the difference.

Used under CC BY 4.0.

The recording of a language being spoken, played from the birth facts on a life. FLEURS is 102 languages, each with the same sentences read aloud by real people; this site uses 143 of those recordings, one per language for each voice the dataset has, across 94 languages. Which one a life plays is chosen once by a curation script and never at random: the speaker's sex is matched to the person drawn, or the other voice is used where the language has only one. No speaker is named, because the dataset names none.

Used under CC BY 4.0.

The sentences those recordings read. FLoRes-200 is a translation benchmark: 3,001 sentences taken from Wikipedia and Wikinews articles and translated into 200 languages, so the same sentence exists in every language here and in English. They were written for none of this. A clip may say something about courier companies or about insects, and that is the point at which it stops being a performance of a language and becomes somebody reading an ordinary sentence.

Used under CC BY-SA 4.0.