A research letter published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine states that women in the United States live an average of 5.8 years longer than men. This is the largest gap since 1996. The gap has increased from 4.8 years in 2010 to 5.8 years in 2021.
The difference in life expectancy is called the longevity gap. It has increased from a two-year gap in 1900 to nearly six years in 2021.
Some reasons why women live longer than men include:
- Lower cardiovascular and lung cancer deaths
- Differences in smoking habits
- Chromosomes
- Hormones
- Heart health
- Size
Other factors that may contribute to the longevity gap include:
- Unintentional injuries, primarily drug overdoses
- Suicides
- COVID-19
- Mental health
The news comes as life expectancy in the U.S. for both genders is shortening. In 2021, life expectancy—76.1 years—decreased for a second consecutive year, fueled by the COVID pandemic and “deaths of despair.” It sat at 78.8 years in 2019 and 77 years in 2020.
The term “deaths of despair” refers to deaths from causes like suicide, drug use, and alcoholic liver disease—factors often connected to economic hardship, depression, and stress, according to Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
“While rates of death from drug overdose and homicide have climbed for both men and women, it is clear that men constitute an increasingly disproportionate share of these deaths,” the first author of the letter, Brandon Yan—a University of California at San Francisco internal medicine resident physician and research collaborator at Harvard Chan School—said in a news release about the study.
In both 2020 and 2021, around 80% of suicides and 70% of accidental drug overdoses were among men, according to a 2023 article in the International Journal for Health Equity and data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
Men also bore the brunt of COVID deaths, suffering 55% of them. The uneven numbers point to the potential need for specialized care for men in areas like mental health to close the life expectancy gap, according to Yan.
“We have brought insights to a worrisome trend,” he said, adding that researchers will need to closely examine numbers from 2022 and beyond to see if the trends hold.
Women outlive men in almost every country in the world, according to the Population Reference Bureau. Globally, the average life expectancy is 79 years for women and 72 years for men. In developed countries like the U.S., the gap widened consistently and dramatically from the 1920s through the 1970s.
Why does such a gap exist? Men are more likely to smoke and take risks, the agency points out. Other differences are likely biological. Estrogen in women may help combat heart disease, and women may have a stronger immune system than men.
