Gender trajectories: how age and marital status influence patterns of gender inequality in later life

Abstract

Research on gender and later life has often taken a feminist political economy perspective, emphasising the disadvantaged position of older women in relation to pensions and access to health and social care (Arber and Ginn, 1991, 1995; Estes, 2001). This chapter extends this approach by examining diversity among older men and women according to marital status. It is important to see marital status in later life as reflecting an older woman's lifecourse, for example, in terms of how childrearing has constrained paid employment and therefore acquisition of pensions, while having children also influences an older person's potential available carers. There are many other bases of diversity in later life, such as class and ethnicity, which may crosscut and amplify gender inequalities (Calasanti and Sleven, 2001), but these are not considered here. Less attention has been paid to older men's lives (Thompson, 1994). This chapter aims to redress some of this imbalance by considering the extent to which the minority of non-partnered men in later life are disadvantaged in terms of financial and material well-being and access to carers. Later life is a predominantly female world. In all developed societies, women live longer than men, resulting in increasingly more older women than men as age advances. The extent of this female numerical dominance varies between societies. In the countries of the former Soviet Union and central Europe, the life expectancy of women is over 10 years more than men (Mesle and Vallin, 2002), and the numerical gender differential is much greater than in the UK. In the UK, women in 2001 could expect to live 4.8 years longer than men – an expectation of life of 80.1 for women and 75.3 for men (ONS, 2003).