Understanding gender inequality in employment and retirement

Abstract

The paper is concerned with the occupation-based inequalities of women and men in economically developed societies. The inequalities in their working lives lead to inequalities in retirement, and particularly the greater poverty endured by women. Occupational gender segregation, the tendency for women and men to work in different occupations, results in gender inequalities. The inequalities are measured by pay and class-status. The extent of the inequality in a country is measured as the vertical dimension of the occupational segregation, which varies appreciably across countries. In employment, men almost always have an advantage on the vertical dimension of pay, while on class-status the advantage lies with women. The gender inequalities in working lives carry over into retirement, though in a somewhat different manner. In retirement there is a wide range of experience from affluence to poverty, with a great many experiencing poverty. Those from lower class-status levels who earned too little to save for pensions, including those who worked part-time, suffer poverty in retirement. The occupational status advantage of women disappears, while their income disadvantage combines with greater life expectancy, with the consequence that women are among the majority of retired people in poverty.

Keywords:

• gender
• life expectancy
• poverty
• retirement
• class
• inequality

Notes on contributors

Robert M Blackburn is an Honorary Professor at Stirling University, an Emeritus Reader in Sociology in the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He is a member of the Academy of Social Sciences. He has published extensively on social inequality and work, especially in relation to social stratification and gender, and is currently working with Jennifer Jarman on a book on gender and employment.

Jennifer Jarman is an Associate Professor in the Sociology department at Lakehead University. Her research interests focus upon globalisation and its implications for the setting and maintenance of employment standards. She has published in the areas of pay equity, occupational segregation, equal opportunities legislation and labour process in new industries and its implications for local labour force development.

Girts Racko is an Assistant Professor at the Warwick Business School (WBS), University of Warwick. He received a PhD in Sociology from Cambridge University. His research interests include occupational gender segregation, institutional study of organisations and normative implications of rationalisation. His research has been published in European Sociological Review; Sociology, Work, Employment and Society; Critical Sociology and Journal of Health Organization and Management.

Notes

1 Information on the construction and use of CAMSIS is available at www.camsis.stir.ac.uk, as are the scores themselves. Prandy (1999) provides a comprehensive introduction.

2 A further five countries (Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, Poland and Portugal) show advantage to women. The measurement is based on too few occupational categories to be precise enough to use here, but there is no doubt about the sign.

3 Similarly, the horizontal component is larger in the five countries not included.

4 If we were to take account of sign, the differences would be much bigger, from +.98 in Russia to +.52 in Austria. However, we consider this to be misleading, as the sign of Horizontal segregation is arbitrary and our interest is in the relative sizes of the contributions to Overall segregation.

5 The 62 countries include the 27 EU members and 35 economically developed countries from the rest of the world, taken from CIA (2011). They are selected on the basis of high GDP, High Human Development Index, population size (excluding small places like Guernsey) and R and D activity. Different sources give slightly different values of life expectancy. These sources appear to be the most recent and reliable (especially EU) but are not entirely consistent with the data year. Most data are for 2009, which is the most recent. The 40 countries not included in Table 2 are Colombia 7.78, Slovakia 7.70, Romania 7.52, Bulgaria 7.31, Brazil 7.30, France 7.05, Finland 6.84, Slovenia 6.77, Chile 6.67, Argentina 6.65, S. Korea 6.65, Uruguay 6.62, Czech Republic 6.27, Portugal 6.06, Ecuador 6.00, Mexico 5.88, Trinidad and Tobago 5.84, Switzerland 5.81, Panama 5.66, Malaysia 5.65, Austria 5.63, Belgium 5.54, Italy 5.51, Norway 5.49, Singapore 5.43, Costa Rica 5.36, Canada 5.29, United Arab Emirates 5.28, Luxembourg 5.24, Ireland 5.13, Germany 5.03, Cyprus 4.99, Australia 4.95, Malta 4.88, Thailand 4.88, Greece 4.86, Oman 4.68, Barbados 4.61, Israel 4.45 and Iceland 4.45.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the ESRC [research grant RES 000-22-2779] for some of the work for this paper.