Introduction. Since the latter half of the 20th century, Poland has witnessed increasing life expectancy inequalities between women and men. In 2012, women’s life expectancy was over 8 years higher than for men. Such disparities mainly arise from differences in the prevalence of those lifestyle behaviours increasing the risk of premature death, such as tobacco smoking and alcohol consumption. This paper is mainly focused on estimating the impact of tobacco-related cancers on life expectancy inequalities between Polish women and men.

Material and methods. The database of the World Health Organization (WHO) was used to supply the statistics on tobacco-related cancer mortality in Poland during 1970–2012, including population size. Male excess mortality was expressed as the difference in life expectancy at birth between females and males. Such inequalities between genders were assessed by Arriaga’s decomposition method. The Joinpoint Regression program was used to analyse time trends.

Results. After excluding gender-specific malignant neoplasms (cervical and ovarian cancers), tobacco-related cancers were found to be responsible for 22% of the differences in life expectancy between females and males for 2012. Male life expectancy at birth was on average shorter by 1.8 years because of cancer mortality being causatively associated with tobacco smoking when compared to females. After accounting for gender-specific cancers in the analysis, there were no significant changes in the observed differences. Tobacco-dependent cancers were found to be responsible for 18% of the difference in 2012, which is associated with 1.5 year shorter male life expectancy as compared to females.

Conclusions. Tobacco-related cancers significantly impact on life expectancy inequalities between females and males and significantly affect excess mortality rates in Polish men.