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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Family ties
— women's work and family histories and their association with income in later life | | Author(s) | Maria Evandrou, Jane Falkingham, Tom Sefton |
| Corporate Author | ESRC Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion - CASE, Suntory-Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines - STICERD, London School of Economics and Political Science; Centre for Research on Ageing, University of, Southampton |
| Publisher | STICERD, London, 2008 |
| Pages | 53 pp (CASEpaper 135) |
| Source | Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/case |
| Keywords | Older women ; The Family ; Employment ; Social roles ; Income [older people] ; Pensions ; Longitudinal surveys. |
| Annotation | Retrospective data from the first 15 waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) is used to examine the relationship between their family and work histories of older women and their individual incomes in later life. Women included in the sample were aged 65+ at some time during the period (1991-2005), who had complete work and/or family histories and with non-missing income data, including a breakdown by income source. This study builds on but differs from two previous studies that used the BHPS to investigate income in later life (Bardasi and Jenkins, 2002 and 2004), by finding the association between women's family histories and their incomes later in life to be relatively weak, and in many cases, insignificant. Divorce, early widowhood and re-marriage are not associated with significant differences in older women's incomes, while motherhood is only associated with a small reduction in income in later life - and not at all for certain groups of the population. While there are significant differences in the work histories of older women with different family histories, this does not translate into large differences in their personal incomes, because work history-related income differentials are also relatively small. Even long periods in employment are not associated with significantly higher incomes in later life if these periods of employment were in predominantly part-time or "mixed" employment. The authors' analysis demonstrates how effective public transfers have been in dampening work history-related differentials in older women's incomes, especially for widows and those toward the bottom of the income distribution. The authors suggest that recent pension reforms should eventually produce more equitable outcomes as between men and women, though possibly at the expense of greater inequality among women with different work and family histories. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-090218003 B |
| Classmark | BD: SJ: WJ: TM5: JF: JJ: 3J |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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