Barriers and facilitators to extended working lives in Europe : a gender focus

Background: There is a global imperative to respond to the challenge of a growing ‘old-age dependency ratio’ by ensuring the workforce is healthy enough to remain in work for longer. Currently more than half of older workers leave before the default retirement age, and in some countries (e.g. the United Kingdom) the time spent in retirement is increasing. At the same time across Europe there is a gender employment gap, with 14.5% fewer female workers between 55-64 years old, and a large variation in the participation of older women in the workforce (ranging from 30%-75%). As older women are under-represented in the workforce, increasing employment in this group has the propensity to go some way towards reducing the old-age dependency ratio to ensure continued economic growth. Objectives: This review explores the barriers and facilitators to extended working lives in Europe, particularly those than impact on women. Methods: A systematic mapping review process was undertaken using four electronic databases, Medline, PsychoInfo, Psych Extra via Ovid and Age Line via EBSCO, using the terms, ‘work’, ‘ageing’, ‘retirement’, ‘pension’, ‘old’, ‘barrier’, ‘extended working life’, ‘gender’, ‘health and wellbeing’. Hand searching was also carried out in the Journal of Aging and Human Development and the Journal of Ageing and Society. Results: The search resulted in 15 English language studies published from 1st January 2005 to the current date that met the inclusion criteria. Key findings: The key factors that influenced decisions to retire or extend working lives in Europe, were health; social factors; workplace factors; and financial security and pension arrangements. Conclusions and implications of key findings: Health was found to be the most commonly cited barrier to extended working lives in Europe, and a number of social inequalities to work exist by gender. Structural factors exist, such as the gender pay gap, which disadvantage women, while the nature of work itself differs by gender and can have a negative impact on health. Currently women tend to exit the labour market earlier than men, however, changes in the state pension age are resulting in women being required to work for as long as men, in most countries. For women to remain healthy at work, workplaces need to consider a range of interventions, including flexible arrangements to both work and retirement to enable women to balance the demands of work with domestic and caring responsibilities that particularly impact on them

Idiosyncratic deals for older workers: increased heterogeneity among older workers enhance the need for i-Deals

The rapid aging of the workforce throughout the Western world and parts of Asia, including Japan and China, poses many challenges on contemporary organizations (European Commission, 2010 ; Wang & Shultz, 2010 ). The Babyboom generation, consisting of workers born between 1945 and 1965, constitutes a large part of the current workforce. Due to decreased fertility rates, there are fewer younger workers entering the labor market, as a consequence of which the percentage of older workers is rapidly increasing (Truxillo & Fraccaroli, 2013 ). Consequently, organizations are increasingly aware that the employee population is changing, and that strategies to employ, motivate, and retain workers have to be adapted accordingly. It is no longer suffi cient for organizations to focus on employing younger workers (e.g., through designing traineeships for graduates), because the infl ux of younger workers in the labor market is stagnating, which is in particular present in certain sectors, such as technical occupations and health care (Polat, Bal, & Jansen, 2012 ). Hence, organizations increasingly will have to rely on older workers, and try to retain older workers, and motivate them to stay longer in the workforce. Similarly, governments across Europe are also increasing offi cial retirement ages, and making it fi nancially less attractive for older workers to retire early (European Commission)

Quality employment for older workers: lesson on resilience from the age & generation study

Abstract not available

Conditional representation : Gendered experiences of combining work and family among local politicians

This article focuses on working and living conditions among local politicians in Sweden, and on their experiences of combining political work and family life. Applying a sociological perspective on representation, we first map the working and living conditions represented among politicians, with a specific focus on gender and age. We then examine experiences of work-family conflict and subjective well-being, and investigate how these outcomes are related to gender, age, and working and living conditions. The main findings show significant gender differences in working and living conditions, and substantially higher levels of work-family conflict among young female politicians