Women worry more than men about outliving their retirement savings. Should they?

Chelsi Rhoades worries about whether she will have enough saved for her retirement.

And she’s just getting started.

The 23-year-old public policy and advocacy specialist from Washington, D.C., is contributing a portion of every paycheck to a 403(b) offered by the nonprofit where she works. An incentive: She receives a 6% matching contribution from her employer.

“That match is what encouraged me to take that step and start saving now,” she told me.

Even so, she stresses over her retirement savings. “It’s hard to know if I’m on track,” Rhoades said. “I save a small portion of my income, and it’s unclear how much that will be by the time I get older.”

Rhoades’s uneasiness aligns with a new retirement survey from BlackRock. When it comes to retirement confidence, the biggest gap in the findings wasn’t between generations, which many surveys trumpet. It was gender.

“I’ve often said that the retirement crisis is a women’s crisis,” Anne Ackerley, BlackRock’s senior adviser on retirement, told Yahoo Finance.

Only 59% of women surveyed report they feel on track for retirement, versus 75% of men. And 65% of women worry they will outlive their retirement savings, compared to 57% of men.

“I recognize that I’m young, and I have a lot more time than others to prepare,” Rhoades said, “but I feel like I’m already behind because I don’t know how that’s going to translate to cover monthly expenses and how long it would last.”

She’s right to worry that it might not be long enough.

Longer lifespans, higher costs

Consider this: Women generally live almost six years longer than men — a life expectancy gap that has widened from a low of 4.8 years in 2010. Meanwhile, 85% of centenarians are women.

So women have to fund longer retirements on lower lifetime earnings due to factors such as gender pay disparities and breaks from their careers for caregiving.

Women are also more likely to work part time or for smaller firms. This often means they don’t have access to an employer-sponsored, tax-deferred retirement plan even when they are working.

The fallout: There’s typically a 30% to 40% gap in savings at retirement between men and women, Ackerley said.

Mind the gap

Biting healthcare costs will be a big factor for women who haven’t planned for living a long life.

Even pre-retirement, women’s healthcare costs top men’s. Across all age groups from 19 to 64, women spend 20% more per year for out-of-pocket medical expenses, even when excluding pregnancy-related services.

In retirement, there’s no relief. An average man enrolled in Medicare Advantage would need $96,000 to cover his health spending needs in retirement, while a woman would need $113,000, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute.

While few, if any, retirees would know such specific numbers, women, on the whole, have a lower understanding of personal finances, which only exacerbates their worries about living in retirement.

Yet there might be something else at play.

“I have to believe part of this is overconfidence on men’s part,” Stephanie McCullough, founder and chief executive of Sofia Financial, told me. “Behavioral finance research has shown that men are more prone to overconfidence and that women tend to underestimate their knowledge and abilities.”

Or maybe women are “simply more realistic here,” she said. “We know we live longer, that we earn less and have the chance to save less than men.”

What women can do

So if we know what we’re facing, here’s how to tackle it.

“Women need to start in their 20s to make saving a high priority, plan for career breaks for caregiving, and generally approach saving for retirement as a long-term investment in their future,” Cindy Hounsell, founder and president of the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement (WISER), told me.