Working later in life may not be a bad thing
Kelvin Murray / Getty Images Source: Stone RF
Many people are looking forward to retirement, but continuing to work later in life can benefit your well -being – especially if you are a man.
People are gaining more and more retirement later in life. A report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) revealed that 28.9% of the 65 to 69 year olds in its 38 member states still worked in 2023, against 15.9% in 2000. But the impact of this on the happiness of people is little understood.
To understand the subject, Alisa Lewin at the University of Haifa and Haya Stier at the University of Tel Aviv, both in Israel, examined the data of the social survey collected by the Central Bureau of Israeli Statistics. They then compared the experiences of more than 3,300 women and just over 2,000 men who had reached their respective retirement of 62 and 67 years.
The couple found that men and women were more likely to work full time if they had a lower household income. But the men who did it also evaluated their satisfaction with economic, family, emotional and general life as equal or even higher than those which did not work at all.
This was true, whatever the type of full -time work that men have done. Meanwhile, women have never experienced improvements in family and economic satisfaction, and only if they occupied a professional, technical or managerial job.
Researchers say it might be due to the fact that women can make more sense and development of other aspects of life. “Women can have other sources of emotional support or social commitment, so they do not get it work, they get it elsewhere,” explains Lewin.
“Men, even now, always perceive their role as taking care of the family and succeeding at work – and that does not stop at 65 [the age people used to be forced to retire in the UK]”Explains Cary Cooper at the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom.
The results were more mixed when evaluating the well-being of the participants who worked part-time, the results varying according to the type of work and the way in which satisfaction is measured, as well as if the participant was a man or a woman.
People whose initial well-being was good could be more inclined to work full time later in life, which could have influenced the results. The results may also not apply to other countries or cultures, explains Cooper.
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