Older Women's Worklife Transitions: Competing Regimes

Background. Age discrimination legislation in Australia has proscribed compulsory retirement, additionally pension eligibility has been deferred to 67. Despite this legislation, embedded age-gender discourses interrelated with organisational processes continue to impede extended working lives.  Organisational discourses were classified along a dimension from the ideal of age-free and gender-free to expressed attributions. These discourses interacted with organisational policy dimensions ranging from age-gender inequality to active age-gender equality practices. The paper asks how these discourses interrelate with organisational equality practices and discrimination.

Methods. These data were collected in an Australian Research Council research project, Retiring Women (2010-13).  Structured key informant interviews were undertaken with a purposefully selected sample of 95 stakeholders including HR directors, professional organisations and unions in three sectors: academia, state services and finance. Interviews were held with older women retirees in these sectors. Comparisons were undertaken between organisational perspectives and retirees’ reconstructions of their retirement transitions.

Findings. In the finance sector overt idealisation of gendered life course, passivity and unexpressed resistance by managers negotiating fractional trajectories coexisted with competing age-gender free discourses. In academia discourses privileged individualised late career flexibilities and normalised retirement transitions. State public sector discourses overtly supported age-graded workforce development, gendered caring responsibilities and inequitable age and gendered hierarchies despite diversity training.

Women retirees’ accounts reconstructed retirement decisions as voluntary. Working life limitations included work intensity, self-definitions of retirement age, declining career opportunities and impaired health. Organisational practices did not contest or rearrange age and gendered hierarchies and structurally underpinned age-inequality practices.    

Conclusion: Competing discourses were identified, with passivity and unexpressed management resistance predominant, reproducing age- and gender-inequality practices. Traditional age and gendered paths to exit were confirmed despite emerging age-free discourse. Anti-discrimination government policy should identify and then contest unexpressed latent discourse underlying organisational practices to structurally counter age and gender-inequality regimes.