Women Working Longer

Increased Employment at Older Ages

Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780226532509
• eBook ISBN: 9780226532646
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Today, more American women than ever before stay in the workforce into their sixties and seventies. This trend emerged in the 1980s, and has persisted during the past three decades, despite substantial changes in macroeconomic conditions. Why is this so? Today's older American women work full-time jobs at greater rates than women in other developed countries.
            In Women Working Longer, editors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz assemble new research that presents fresh insights on the phenomenon of working longer. Their findings suggest that education and work experience earlier in life are connected to women's later-in-life work.  Other contributors to the volume investigate additional factors that may play a role in late-life labor supply, such as marital disruption, household finances, and access to retirement benefits.  A pioneering study of recent trends in older women's labor force participation, this collection offers insights valuable to a wide array of social scientists, employers, and policy makers.
 

I

Transitions over the Life Cycle

1

Women Working Longer

Facts and Some Explanations

Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz

Women have been working longer for a long time in US history. Their labor market participation increased decade after decade during the twentieth century, as more women were drawn into the labor force. But that is an old story. The new story is that a large portion of women are working a lot longer into their sixties and even their seventies. Their increased participation at older ages started in the late 1980s before the turnaround in older men’s labor force participation and before the economic downturns of the first decade of the twenty-first century.¹

Women’s increased participation beyond their fifties is a change of real consequence. Rather than being an increase in marginal part-time workers, the higher labor force participation of older women disproportionately consists of those working at full-time jobs. Women are remaining on their jobs as they age rather than scaling down or leaving for positions with shorter hours and fewer days.²

Why have women as a group increased their participation at older ages? Increased labor force participation of women in their older ages, we will emphasize, is part of the general increase in cohort labor force participation rates. Successive cohorts, for various reasons, increased their participation at all ages, resulting in an upward shift of participation by birth cohort. As more women graduated from college, held jobs with greater advancement potential, enjoyed their jobs more, were not currently married or were married to men who also extended employment into their senior years, more remained active in the labor force into their sixties and beyond.

Rising cohort effects in labor force participation across successive birth cohorts of US women are clearly visible in the microdata from the Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) and the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS). But these cohort effects are considerably dampened when education is considered. Higher participation at all ages has been due to greater levels of education, particularly college graduation. The increase in cohort effects in labor force participation for women in their late fifties and early sixties is also lessened by including work experience at younger ages and by adding information on the main prior occupation. We find some (negative) impact on employment at older ages from having been a teacher and discuss why that is the case.

Most important is that we find that those who “enjoyed” their jobs earlier in life remained employed for much longer later in life independent of their hours and earnings on the job six to eight years earlier. The difference between those who agree with the statement about enjoying their job versus those who disagree with the statement is 10 percentage points (on a base of 70) and the effect is twice that between those who strongly disagree with the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• National Bureau of Economic Research
• Relation of the Directors to the Work and Publications of the National Bureau of Economic Research
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Transitions over the Life Cycle
• II. Family Matters: Caregiving, Marriage, and Divorce
• III. Financial Considerations: Resources, Pensions, and Social Security
• Appendix: The Health and Retirement Study (HRS)
• Contributors
• Notes
• Author Index
• Subject Index