Abstract
Extending working life beyond the state pension age is a key European Union policy. In the UK, women are more likely to extend paid work than men, indicating that factors other than the state pension age play a role in working longer. Women are less able to build pension income due to their role as carer within the family. It, therefore, follows that gender inequalities over the life course continue into older age to influence need, capacity and desire to undertake paid work after state pension age. This paper explores how work, marital and fertility history impact upon the likelihood of extending employment. It uses the British Household Panel Survey’s retrospective data from the first 14 waves to summarise work–family histories, and logistic regression to understand the impact of work and family histories on extending paid work. Findings show that, on the one hand, women are extending paid work for financial reasons to make up for ‘opportunity costs’ as a result of their caring role within the family, with short breaks due to caring, lengthy marriages, divorcing and remaining single with children all being important. Yet, there is also evidence of ‘status maintenance’ from working life, with the women most likely to extend paid work, also those with the highest work orientation, prior to state pension age. But lengthy dis-attachment (due to caring) from the labour market makes extending working life more difficult. This has implications for policy strategies to entice women into paid work to make up for low independent financial resources.
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Notes
In the UK, state pension age is 60 for women and 65 for men.
Sensitivity analysis was undertaken using household income data. Generally, the results did not change when household income was used but the sample size was reduced.
Exploratory analysis was undertaken using different definitions, namely extending working life for a full year after state pension age and extending working life for a total of a year (but not necessarily in succession). But there were no large differences in the results, and these more limited definitions produced smaller cells numbers, which would make analysis of sub groups difficult.
Home Responsibilities Protection (HRP) worked by reducing the number of qualifying years you needed for a full basic State Pension. For most of the women in our sample, the home responsibilities protection allowance introduced in 1978 would have been introduced too late to make a significant difference.
An alternative explanation could be that married women work longer to retire with their partners (since entitlement to derived pension rights only begins once husbands are retired). But this analysis has controlled for whether a partner is employed or not, and this variable makes little difference to the odds ratio.
Although there were differences found between those returning to full-time and part-time work, both groups were in a relatively advantageous position in the labour market.
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This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.
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Communicated by H. Litwin.
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Finch, N. Why are women more likely than men to extend paid work? The impact of work–family life history. Eur J Ageing 11, 31–39 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10433-013-0290-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10433-013-0290-8