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It is well established that men are at higher risk of most non–sex-specific cancers than women, but there has been surprisingly little research investigating these differences. This is possibly because differences in exposure to established risk factors and hypothesised protection by female sex hormones are thought to account for the totality of the sex differences. These explanations remain somewhat speculative, as the magnitude of the sex ratio in cancer incidence has not been systematically studied, with no quantitative estimate of the variability of the sex ratio across countries, age groups, and periods of diagnosis. We analysed worldwide cancer incidence data for the years 1978–2007 in terms of sex disparities, and explicitly quantified the variability in sex disparities by age, year, and geographical region. Our analysis highlights several cancer types for which suspected and commonly accepted factors are unlikely …