Do men and women experience retirement differently?
Emeritus Professors Susan Moore and Doreen Rosenthal are the authors of New Age Nanas Being a Grandmother in the 21st Century. They’re currently conducting research focusing on women's experiences with retirement.
This is probably the first era in recent history that women have retired from the paid workforce in such large numbers. Many of us had ‘stay-at-home’ mothers who experienced a change in their lifestyle when the children left home or when their husbands retired, but their social group and their role as homemakers remained much the same. Now, a large cohort of older women, who have been earning an independent living for many years, are about to retire or have recently done so. They find that their roles, financial situation and status all change, as do the people they spend all day with. The routines, the reason for getting up in the morning and putting on your glad rags, the need to remember ten things at once – are all suddenly very different. How are today’s women managing these changes?
We are a couple of academic women who retired at about the same time, and found ourselves missing some of the buzz of the working day. Yes we had more time to be with our husbands and families, to travel, to read and to indulge in some of those hobbies we hadn’t picked up for years. But too much leisure can be exhausting. We sought the mental stimulus that our careers in the social sciences provided, without the administration, the late hours and the pressure.
What to do? Well dear reader we decided to write about our experiences and those of other women of our generation. It started with research on grandmothering, leading to our book, New Age Nanas: Being a Grandmother in the 21st Century in which we described the pleasures and pains of being a nana from the points of view of over 1,000 Australian grandmothers. We had so much fun writing that book, meeting many enthusiastic grandmothers, reflecting on our own experiences and reading the research of others that we decided to plunge in again.
This time around, we are researching and writing about what retirement is like for today’s modern woman. We know there will be many and varied stories out there of plans brought to happy fruition and others dashed by circumstance. We’d like to know how women are structuring their retirement years, how much planning is important, what factors contribute to a satisfying retirement and what the key problems seem to be.
Did you know that nearly all the published research on retirement focuses on men? We don’t know whether men and women cope differently with this life change or whether they face different issues. Can you help us to answer these questions?
Our research project (conducted under the auspices of Swinburne University of Technology and The University of Melbourne) focuses on the experiences of women aged 55 years or older, who have substantially retired from the paid workforce. If you fit that category we invite you to fill out an anonymous online questionnaire about your retirement.
The survey can be accessed directly online here or you can like our Facebook page here and find the link there.
Related links:
Free online resources to keep your mind active over 60
Are you having a “late-life” crisis?
Spending time with grandkids keeps you young at heart