Older Women Overtake Men in the Job Market

By Andrew Taylor, The Financial Times Limited 2008 

October 27, 2008

United Kingdom

More older women have jobs than ever before, outstripping working men of a corresponding age, according to official figures.

Men aged 50 and over suffered badly in the previous two recessions, in the early 1980s and early 1990s. Many older workers in manufacturing industries were forced into early retirement or moved onto incapacity benefit.

Employment rates for older men have recovered since the early 1990s but they have been overtaken in the job market by women as the sexes approach the ages at which they become eligible for state pensions, currently 60 for women and 65 for men.

The employment rate for men in the five years before the male state pension age is 58.4 per cent compared with 63.9 per cent for women aged 55 to 60. The employment rate beyond pension age is also slightly higher for women at 12.3 per cent compared with 10.7 per cent for men, according to ONS.

Age discrimination laws introduced two years ago should make it harder for employers to single out middle-aged men for redundancy, because they are more highly paid and closer to retiring, than others.

Pressure on companies to fund pensions also means employers will no longer be able to use pension arrangements to cushion the impact of early retirement. New rules introduced today will also make it more difficult to access incapacity benefits.

According to ONS the overall male employment rate has fallen from more than 90 per cent in the early 1970s to about 79 per cent. In spite of this long-term decline, male unemployment has risen by only 2.9 percentage points while economic inactivity among males has increased by 11.3 per cent.

"The older workers who lost their jobs had more difficulty finding new work and many ended up, more or less permanently, on invalidity benefits and were therefore likely not to be recorded as unemployed," said ONS.

The female employment rate over the same period has risen from less than 60 per cent in the 1970s to slightly more than 70 per cent. The gap as a result has narrowed from 35.7 percentage points to 8.4 percentage points. Women, however, are more likely to work part time than men.

The average retirement age for men has risen to 64.6, the highest level since 1984 and to 61.9 years for women, says Taen (The Age and Employment Network). The government intends to increase the state pension age to 65 for women between 2010 and 2020.

Chris Ball, Taen's chief executive, said: "Particularly interesting is that only a third of women working over the age of 50 are now actually retiring before they reach their current state pension age of 60 and that in the five years leading up to their state pension ages, more women are working than men.

"The fact that the average actual retirement age of women has risen to 61.9 years, is indicative of both the 'pensions disadvantage' that women of that generation face - both in regard to state and occupational pensions - and also of a genuine desire amongst many of them to go on working."

The increase in the ages at which both men and women aged above 50 were withdrawing from the labour force showed the trend towards earlier retirement has been reversed. 

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