Pensioner employment, well-being, and gender : lessons from Russia
Date
01/07/2021Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Encouraging pensioner employment is one answer to the challenge of aging societies. Employment positively influences the subjective well-being (SWB) of working-age populations, but the implications for pensioners, including variance by gender and occupational class, are unclear. We examine this variance using mixed methods on data from Russia, where pensioner employment is comparatively high. Utilizing data on 5,703 individuals ages 45–70 from 12 waves of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (2003–15), we estimate individual fixed-effects models for life satisfaction, exploring mechanisms using longitudinal qualitative data. We find pensioner employment positively influences SWB of both genders across the occupational hierarchy. We attribute the muting of occupational variance to the decommodifying action of pensions. We find gender differences in mechanisms: pensioner employment gives women a noneconomic SWB boost, but additional income explains men’s SWB improvements. We theorize this finding using our qualitative data, showing how gendered age schemas shape pensioner well-being.
Citation
Ashwin , S , Keenan , K & Kozina , I M 2021 , ' Pensioner employment, well-being, and gender : lessons from Russia ' , American Journal of Sociology , vol. 127 , no. 1 , pp. 152-193 . https://doi.org/10.1086/715150
Publication
American Journal of Sociology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0002-9602Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2021 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the final published version of the work, which was originally published at https://doi.org/10.1086/715150
Description
The qualitative research was funded by INTAS grant 97-20280, and grants from Sticerd (LSE) and the LSE Research Committee Seed Fund.Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.