Is 70 the new 60? Extending American women’s and men’s working lives

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra Street ◽  
Joanne Tompkins
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Older Workers ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Unpaid Care ◽  
Global Recession ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
The Us ◽  
Time Work

Although the United States economy rebounded relatively quickly from the global recession, older workers wanting or needing to work longer confront similar limitations to those in other countries. The critical role of Social Security for shaping patterns of later life work is considered, alongside the US neoliberal stance that minimizes family-friendly policies that would support more equal gender outcomes for work and retirement. Instead, the structure of employment markets, persistent gender gaps in pay, raced and gendered outcomes related to sources and amounts of retirement income, and increasing retirement ages that compel some of the most vulnerable Americans to work longer are considered. The concept of extended working life is considered at both ends of the adult life course, taking into account the challenges of both young and older workers given the realities of the US labour market, underscoring the importance of taking both labour supply and demand into account to fully understand the implications of extended working lives. Although women bear a disproportionate burden of unpaid care, few compensatory policies exist to ensure their income adequacy in old age. That, combined with ageism in the American workplace, make older women who have interrupted work histories or lifetimes of low paid or part time work very vulnerable to experiencing precarious employment, or low incomes/poverty in old age.

scholarly journals WORKING LONGER FOR ACADEMICS IN THE U.S. AND IRELAND: A GENDERED LIFECOURSE ANALYSIS

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S129-S129
Author(s):  
Aine Ni Leime
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Older Workers ◽  
Work Life ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Retirement Age ◽  
Policy Changes ◽  
Life Trajectories ◽  
Care Giving ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
The Us

Abstract Many governments including the US and Ireland have been advocating longer working lives for all workers to ensure pension sustainability in the light of population ageing. Policy changes encouraging increased social security/state pensions age reflect this. However, there has been limited investigation of how the gender implications of these policy changes. While longer working lives may be attractive for some workers, there is evidence that women and men have profoundly different work-life trajectories and women may be more financially disadvantaged approaching retirement age. There is a need to explore how this affects their ability and/or desire to continue working past traditional retirement age and their financial security. This presentation is based on analysis of evidence from an EU-funded cross-national research project involving work-life history interviews conducted with forty older workers in academia in the US and Ireland in 2016 and 2017. A lifecourse approach is used to analyse interview data from ten male and ten female academics in Ireland and ten male and ten female academics in the US, aged 50 or over. Participants discussed early influences, work-life history and health concerns. The paper uses a cumulative disadvantage perspective to analyse how gender, family and health trajectories across the life course affect and can limit options around late work and retirement. It concludes that gender differences regarding norms of care-giving are important and that extending working life is more likely to be caused by financial necessity for women. The implications for future research and policy are discussed.

scholarly journals Exclusion and Inequality in Late Working Life–On the Gendered Risks for Old-Age Exclusion in Sweden and Poland

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 65-65
Author(s):  
Andreas Motel-Klingebiel ◽  
Jolanta Perek-Białas ◽  
Indre Genelyte ◽  
Susanne Kelfve
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Older Workers ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Working Life ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Labour Force Participation ◽  
Gender Inequalities ◽  
Institutional Conditions ◽  
Economic Exclusion ◽  
The Uk

Abstract The labour market activity of older workers and their ability and disposition to maintain it depend on institutional conditions, age norms, labour demand and shifting overall economic conditions. The paper discusses exclusion and inequality in later working life from a European comparative perspective and emphasises shifts in late work and retirement patterns as well as later-life outcomes in Sweden and Poland. An emphasis is on changing institutional conditions on the national and branch level. Gendered risks for economic exclusion and later life precarity are stressed. Analyses for the two countries are contrasted with Germany and the UK. The analyses are part of the research program ‘Exclusion and Inequality in Late Working Life: Evidence for Policy Innovation Towards Inclusive Extended Work and Sustainable Working Conditions in Sweden and Europe – EIWO’ (2019-24). Analyses use data from SHARE and EU-SILC and address older workers of age 60 and older in Sweden, Poland, German and the UK. They find increasingly heterogeneous preretirement and transition patterns, new gender gaps and increasing risks of economic exclusion in retirement. Situations differ between countries with the prolongation of late working life in Sweden having a mostly positive effect on gender inequalities with low education and specific migrant groups as an exception. Poland is specific case due to unequally low retirement age for woman (60) and for men (65) with consequently large structural gender differences and increases in the process of increasing labour force participation of older workers and increasingly gendered risks for old-age economic exclusion.

scholarly journals AGEISM AT WORK: A THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL CONSIDERATION

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S569-S570
Author(s):  
Sarah A Vickerstaff ◽  
Mariska van der Horst ◽  
Debra A Street
Keyword(s):  
Older Workers ◽  
Research Topic ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Psychological Theories ◽  
Age Related ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Eu

Abstract Ageism at work is becoming an increasingly popular research topic. It has been claimed that ageism is a serious threat to the extending working lives agenda that is prevalent in many Western countries, including the US and many countries in the EU. In this symposium, we consider this concept from a variety of perspectives in order to better understand what ageism is as well as how it affects older workers. To get a better grip on the concept, Sarah Vickerstaff and Mariska van der Horst look at the intersectionality of this concept, by assessing its relationships with gender and disability. Clary Krekula uses the concept of age coding to look at how both age normality and ageism are constructed. Jaap Oude Mulders assesses how age-related stereotypes translate into employment preferences of employers. Hannah Swift et al., testing social psychological theories, uses results from two experiments to analyse the role of ageism in recruitment practices. This symposium is inter-disciplinary combining sociologists, social psychologists and gerontologists and further combines quantitative (Jaap Oude Mulders), qualitative (Clary Krekula, Sarah Vickerstaff, and Mariska van der Horst) and experimental (Hannah Swift) methods. Together, the papers in this symposium show various dimensions of the concept ‘ageism’ and how it affects older workers in three European countries: Sweden, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.

The empirical landscape of extended working lives

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debra Street
Keyword(s):  
Older Workers ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Labour Force Participation ◽  
Demographic Ageing ◽  
Unpaid Care ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Dependency Ratios ◽  
Part Time ◽  
And Gender

Population-level factors associated with demographic ageing and policies intended to encourage older workers to extend working lives in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Sweden, UK and US are documented in this chapter. Data are from international sources (mainly the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the CIA Factbook, to ensure comparability) derived from government agencies in the seven countries covered in this volume. Presenting population-level data for each country gives readers a starting point for considering how each nation compares to the others analysed in the later country chapters. Data related to demographic ageing, including patterns in longevity, proportion of national populations aged 65+, and country-specific dependency ratios are presented first. These set the stage for understanding the potential gendered implications of demands for older workers to postpone retirement and extend their working lives. Additional comparative data provided in this chapter include nation-specific patterns of women's and men's labour force participation, gender pay and gender pension gaps, typical retirement ages, and a summary of older worker's recent experiences in the labour market. Patterns of unpaid care work, time use, and full-time versus part-time employment are also compared to provide a foundation against which readers can assess the prospects for older workers in general, and the particular disadvantages faced by older women in particular, when governments demand that individuals postpone retirement and work longer.

scholarly journals Early-life socioeconomic circumstances explain health differences in old age, but not their evolution over time

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (8) ◽  
pp. 703-711 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boris Cheval ◽  
Dan Orsholits ◽  
Stefan Sieber ◽  
Silvia Stringhini ◽  
Delphine Courvoisier ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Health Indicators ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Healthy Ageing ◽  
Rate Of Change ◽  
Health Differences ◽  
Over Time

BackgroundEarly-life socioeconomic circumstances (SEC) are associated with health in old age. However, epidemiological evidences on the influence of these early-life risk factors on trajectories of healthy ageing are inconsistent, preventing drawing solid conclusion about their potential influence. Here, to fill this knowledge gap, we used a statistical approach adapted to estimating change over time and an outcome-wide epidemiology approach to investigate whether early-life SEC were associated with the level of and rate of decline of physical, cognitive and emotional functioning over time.MethodsWe used data on more than 23 000 adults in older age from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, a 12-year large-scale longitudinal study with repeated measurements of multiple health indicators of the same participants over time (2004 –2015, assessments every 2 years). Confounder-adjusted linear growth curve models were used to examine the associations of early-life SEC with the evolution of muscle strength, lung function, cognitive function, depressive symptoms and well-being over time.ResultsWe consistently found an association between early-life SEC and the mean levels of all health indicators at age 63.5, with a critical role played by the cultural aspect of disadvantage. These associations were only partly explained by adult-life SEC factors. By contrast, evidences supporting an association between early-life SEC and the rate of change in health indicators were weak and inconsistent.ConclusionsEarly-life SEC are associated with health in old age, but not with trajectories of healthy ageing. Conceptual models in life course research should consider the possibility of a limited influence of early-life SEC on healthy ageing trajectories.

scholarly journals Work-Life Imbalance in Extended Working Lives: Domestic Divisions of Labour and Partners’ Perceptions of Job Pressures of Non-Retiring Older Workers

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 289-311
Author(s):  
Andreas Cebulla ◽  
Nathan Hudson-Sharp ◽  
Lucy Stokes ◽  
David Wilkinson
Keyword(s):  
Older Workers ◽  
Later Life ◽  
European Social Survey ◽  
Work Life ◽  
Retirement Age ◽  
Paid Work ◽  
Social Survey ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Domestic Labour ◽  
Life Analysis

Abstract Extending working lives prolongs existing patterns of time spent in work or with family into later life. Analysis of European Social Survey data shows a widening in inequitable domestic divisions of labour in households with post-retirement age workers. We explore partners’ perceptions of older workers’ job pressures when close to or beyond retirement age. Partners’ concerns about job pressures are found not to be immediately associated with inequitable divisions of domestic labour but with the extent to which workers can determine the organisation of paid work and, specifically, tiredness after work. The paper argues that note should be taken of these concerns as they may be indicative of risks of intra-domestic stress. Zusammenfassung: Ungleichgewicht zwischen Beruf und Privatleben im verlängerten Arbeitsleben: Arbeitsteilung im Haushalt und Wahrnehmung des Arbeitsdrucks älterer Arbeitnehmer durch deren Partner Die Verlängerung des Arbeitslebens verschiebt auch die bestehende Arbeitszeit- oder das Familienleben zu späteren Zeitpunkten im Leben. Die Analyse der Daten des European Social Survey zeigt, dass sich die ungleiche Arbeitsteilung in Haushalten mit Arbeitnehmern, die über das Renteneintrittsalter hinaus beschäftigt sind, ausweitet. Wir untersuchen, wie Partner den Arbeitsdruck älterer Arbeitnehmer, die kurz vor oder nach Erreichen des typischen Renteneintrittsalter stehen, wahrnehmen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Besorgnis der Partner älterer Beschäftigter über die Verantwortung und den Druck nicht unmittelbar mit einer ungleichen Verteilung von Hausarbeit verbunden ist, sondern mit dem Ausmaß, in dem die Arbeitenden ihren Arbeitstag selbst organisieren können und insbesondere auch mit der Müdigkeit nach der Arbeit. In dem Papier wird argumentiert, dass diese Bedenken zur Kenntnis genommen werden sollten, insoweit sie auf ein Risiko von Stress innerhalb der Beziehung hindeuten.

scholarly journals ‘Fuller’ or ‘extended’ working lives? Critical perspectives on changing transitions from work to retirement

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 629-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRIS PHILLIPSON
Keyword(s):  
Older Workers ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Economic Recession ◽  
Working Life ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Essential Requirement ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Part Time ◽  
New Forms Of Work

ABSTRACTResearch on older workers and retirement has yet to adjust fully to an environment influenced by a combination of demographic change, technological developments and economic recession. A key dimension to the changing relationship between ageing and work is the tension between policies to extend working life and the increasingly fragmented nature of late working life, with the emergence of varied transitions, including: bridge employment, second/third careers, part-time working, early retirement and other variations. These developments indicate both the challenge of conceptualising new forms of work-ending, and – in policy terms – the extent to which these can successfully accommodate longer working lives. The paper provides a critical perspective to the policy of extending working life and the narrative which underpins this approach. The paper argues that retirement has become a ‘contested’ institution in the 21st century, fragmented across different pathways and transitions affecting people in their fifties and sixties. The paper argues the case for improving work quality and security as a precondition for supporting policies for encouraging working in later life. An essential requirement for this will include linking debates on extending working life with technological developments and changes affecting the workplace, creating differentiated paths to retirement and labour force exit, enhancing the provision of training and continuing education, and re-thinking the idea of the ‘older worker’.

scholarly journals Length of working life and pension income: empirical evidence on gender and socioeconomic differences from Finland

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
SUSAN KUIVALAINEN ◽  
SATU NIVALAINEN ◽  
NOORA JÄRNEFELT ◽  
KATI KUITTO
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Life Time ◽  
First Year ◽  
Socioeconomic Differences ◽  
Income Differences ◽  
Unique Data ◽  
Pension Income ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Time Work ◽  
Work Histories

AbstractIn this paper, we analyze gender and socioeconomic differences in the length of working lives and pension income in Finland. Based on internationally unique data covering 50 years of recorded information on individual employment histories and first-year old-age pension income of a cohort retiring in 2011, we trace life-time work histories and their relation to pension income with greater precision than previous studies. While gender and socioeconomic income differences in the lengths of working lives are modest, differences in pension income are more pronounced. The residence-based national pension targeted at those with no or only low earning-related pension accrual plays an important role in cushioning old-age income differences. The results suggest that unequal life-time earnings and occupational segregation remain main challenges for equalizing pension income in old age.

Flexible Employment in Later Life: Public Policy Panaceas in the Search for Mechanisms to Extend Working Lives

2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry Platman
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Older Workers ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Self Employment ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Flexible Employment ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Multi Stakeholder ◽  
The Uk

Flexible employment has been suggested as an important policy solution to ‘the problem’ of inactive older workers. Temporary contracts, part-time jobs, self-employment and freelance consulting have been seen as viable options for people needing to make gradual transitions into retirement and for governments wishing to encourage an extension to working lives. Using the case of the UK, the paper examines the multi-stakeholder appeal of flexible transitions into retirement. However, the term has been poorly defined and conceptualised. Drawing on her own research, the author challenges the notion of flexible extensions to working lives for the oldest members of the labour force.

scholarly journals Aetiology of late-life depression

1999 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 435-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Baldwin
Keyword(s):  
Depressive Disorder ◽  
Old Age ◽  
Clinical Presentation ◽  
Late Onset ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Late Life Depression ◽  
Heterogeneous Condition ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Research

Depressive disorder has no single cause. Arguably, in old age it is a more heterogeneous condition than in earlier adult life, in both clinical presentation and causation. A broad distinction is often made between early- and late-onset depression in later life. The aetiology of these may differ and is currently the subject of new research.

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