705 Introduction Widowhood is widely regarded as a women’s issue. In all developed and nearly all developing nations, women are more likely than men to survive the death of their spouse, reflecting men’s higher rates of mortality and the tendency of women to marry men slightly older than themselves. Women also are more likely than men to remain unmarried after their spouse dies, due both to a highly skewed sex ratio among older adults and men’s greater desire to remarry after losing a spouse. Moreover, widowhood has increasingly become an older women’s issue; as life expectancy has increased steadily over the past century in virtually every nation, spousal loss overwhelmingly befalls older adults. As such, widowhood has important consequences for the living arrangements and physical, economic and psy- chological well-being of older adults. The distinctive ways that older men and women experience widow- hood are shaped by demographic factors, including the timing of their spouse’s death; the number and gender distribution of their children; the living arrangements, employment patterns and migration patterns of their children; one’s own physical health and functioning in later life; cultural context; and gender-typed socializa- tion processes that occur over the life course. In this chapter, we: (1) document gendered patterns of mortality and spousal loss in developed and devel- oping nations; (2) describe the marital status and living arrangement patterns of older adults in developed and developing nations; (3) highlight the data needs and analytic tools required for effectively documenting the consequences of spousal loss; (4) discuss the physical and psychological consequences of widowhood for older men and women; and (5) set forth recommendations for future research on gender, aging and widowhood. Gender and Aging Gendered Patterns of Mortality Global population aging is “not gender-neutral” (Mirkin and Weinberger 2001). Women account for the majority of older persons in almost every country in the world. The main reason for this advantage is the gen- der gap in mortality. Although more boys than girls are born, males have higher mortality rates than females at every stage of the life course, reflecting males’ weaker cardiopulmonary systems in infancy and higher levels of risk-taking behavior, including smoking, alcohol consumption and physically strenuous work in adult- hood (Verbrugge 1985). As a result, female life expec- tancy is higher than male life expectancy in nearly every nation, although the magnitude of this gap varies over the life course and across regions. Life expectancy is a statistical projection of the length of an individual’s life. Specifically, it is an estimate of the average number of additional years a person can expect to live if the age-specific death rates for a given year prevail for the rest of his or her life. It is a hypo- thetical measure because it is based on current death rates, yet actual death rates change over the course of a Chapter 32 Gender, Aging and Widowhood Deborah Carr and Susan Bodnar-Deren D. Carr () Department of Sociology and Institute for Health Health Care Policy and Aging Research Rutgers University 30 College Ave. New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA E-mail: carrds@rci.rutgers.edu P. Uhlenberg (ed.), International Handbook of Population Aging, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4020-8356-3_32, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009