Why Retirement, Social Security, and Age Discrimination Policies Need to Consider the Intersectional Experiences of Older Women

Abstract

We provide an overview of research that indicates that older women face unique challenges and opportunities with respect to work, retirement, Social Security, and age discrimination law. We present estimates of poverty by age and sex, showing that poverty increases with age for women due to older women often outliving their spouses and becoming widowed. We discuss research that shows that women benefit more than men from working longer. We then note that older women face intersectional discrimination that can unfortunately be a barrier to older women working longer. We detail how older women often "fall between the cracks" of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and are thus not well protected against this intersectional discrimination. As a final example of how women face different circumstances, we summarize research on how older women were differentially negatively impacted by the elimination of Social Security's Retirement Earnings.

Early Evidence on the Impact of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the Recession on Older Workers

“… Note : Authors’ calculations using data from the Current Population Survey (monthly) from 1976 to April 2020, via IPUMS-CPS. Our “U-6+” rate is a broadened U-6 rate, as detailed in Bui, Button, & Picciotti (2020) . We use the average rate in 2019 rather than the rate in April 2019 to reduce sampling variation.…”

“…However, classifications of the employment status of individuals have been prone to errors during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we calculated two versions of the employment rate and three versions of the unemployment rate, as detailed in Bui, Button, and Picciotti (2020) .…”

Ageism in the COVID-19 pandemic: age-based discrimination in triage decisions and beyond

“…Intersectionality is also necessary to avoid age-based discrimination in the economic domain(Burn et al, 2020).3 The author is a young white man who researches bioethics and ethics of technology. I felt privileged also because my life and job have not been compromised during the pandemic, and because I have recovered from COVID-19 without sequels.4 It is also important to note how ageism and ableism have intersected in some triage decisions, such as in the nursing home scandal of Madrid (seeRico 2020).…”

“… 2 Intersectionality is also necessary to avoid age-based discrimination in the economic domain (Burn et al, 2020 ). …”

Gender Identity, Race, and Ethnicity-based Discrimination in Access to Mental Health Care: Evidence from an Audit Correspondence Field Experiment

“…Lastly, to our knowledge, we are the first study to use experimental methods to examine how race, ethnicity, and gender identity interact to moderate or exacerbate discrimination. This adds to the limited experimental research on intersectional discrimination in general (Bourabain and Verhaeghe 2018;Burn et al 2020;Lahey and Oxley 2018;Lauster and Easterbrook 2011;Pedulla 2014;Schwegman 2019). There is ample reason to believe that TNB people of color will experience more significant discrimination than their cisgender non-white or white transgender/non-binary peers.…”