Australians older than 50 – and particularly those who left school before year 12 – are increasingly working longer while dealing with long-term health issues, researchers say.
An Australian study published in the August edition of Lancet Public Health found while people across genders and education levels are working for longer, those years aren’t necessarily spent in good health.
Researchers, led by the Ageing Futures Institute at the University of New South Wales, took life expectancy and separated it into four periods: years working in good health, years working in poor health, years retired in good health and years retired in poor health.
Using data from more than 9,000 households that participated in the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, the researchers examined how health in these stages of life changed between 2001 and 2020.
Dr Kim Kiely, a co-author of the paper, said those who left school before year 12 are losing years of healthy life, with their extra years in the workforce mainly spent in poor health. This is opposite to the trend among people who completed high school.
While there have been improvements in life expectancy, women, on average, are not gaining extra healthy life years, he said.
“What we do see is women living for longer overall in poor health and disability,” Kiely said.
“This is likely due to women’s greater longevity and differential contributions of diseases affecting men and women as they age. It is more common for older women to live with non-fatal and disabling long-term health conditions such as musculoskeletal diseases and dementia.”
Despite this, the research doesn’t suggest women work for longer in poor health. “In fact, from age 50, men work for nine months longer in poor health than women,” he said.
The data doesn’t reveal how or why health affects gender differences in retirement decisions or length of working life.
“But we can speculate that women of this generation leave the workforce earlier due to poor health because they are usually working in occupations that are less able to accommodate health limitations,” Kiely said.
“Older women are also more likely to face a double whammy of both ageism and gender discrimination in the workplace.”
The majority of workers aged over 65 are in professional or managerial roles, where it is easier to make accommodations for poor health, Kiely said. “Among the cohorts we are looking at, [those] born before 1960, these sorts of jobs are more likely to filled by men.”
Kiely said the main strategy to address increased life expectancy and, therefore, a need for ongoing income, has been to raise the pension age and increase the private income that recipients can earn before their payments are lowered.
But he said employers need to create opportunities for older people to work, address ageism, and include accommodations such as flexible arrangements, while there also needs to be access to lifelong education and training.
The chief executive of Women With Disabilities Victoria, Nadia Mattiazzo, said the finding that a person’s level of education is strongly correlated to the years they do paid work while in poor health is “significant”. But she said a limitation of the study is that it did not capture the full scope of gendered issues.
“Women often reduce their hours in the workforce later in life to allow them to care for grandchildren or elderly parents,” Mattiazzo said. “The impact to women’s overall economic participation and correlates to their health are therefore not captured.”
She said throughout their lives, women are more likely to be under-employed, or work part-time due to disproportionately taking up caring responsibilities, along with workplace discrimination.
“This is not a criticism of their research, but rather a question for us about how we define ‘work’ in our society and what forms of work are visible and valued,” Mattiazzo said.
