Gender and socioeconomic inequalities in health and wellbeing across age in France and Switzerland

Abstract

There is increasing evidence that wellbeing is unequally distributed across sociodemographicgroups in contemporary societies. However, less is known about thedivergence across social groups of trajectories of wellbeing across age groups.This issue is of great relevance in contexts characterised by changing populationstructures and growing imbalances across and within generations, and in whichensuring that everyone has the opportunity to have a happy and healthy life courseis a primary welfare goal. In this study, we investigate wellbeing trends in Franceand Switzerland across age, gender, and socioeconomic status groups. We use twohousehold surveys (the Sant´e et Itin´eraires Professionnels and the Swiss HouseholdPanel) to compare the unfolding inequalities in health and wellbeing across agegroups in two rich countries. We view wellbeing as multidimensional, followingthe literature highlighting the importance of considering different dimensions andmeasures of wellbeing. Thus, we investigate a number of outcomes, includingdifferent measures of physical and mental health, as well as of relational wellbeing,using a linear regression model and a linear probability model. Our findings showinteresting country and dimension-specific heterogeneities in the development ofhealth and wellbeing over age. While our results indicate that there are gender andeducational inequalities in both Switzerland and France, and that gender inequalitiesin mental health accumulate with age in both countries, we also find that educationalinequalities in health and wellbeing remain rather stable across age groups.