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Socio-economic inequalities in later life: the role of gender
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Vlachantoni, Athina |
| Copyright Year | 2018 |
| Abstract | In her Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Fraser noted that ‘gender contains both an economic face that brings it within the ambit of redistribution and a cultural face that brings it simultaneously within the ambit of recognition’ (Fraser, 1996, 17). Gender’s place in the ‘politics of recognition’ and the ‘politics of redistribution’ is nowhere better illustrated than when exploring gender inequalities across the life course and in later life in terms of socio-economic resources and the risk of experiencing poverty (Falkingham, Evandrou and Vlachantoni, 2010). Such risk is the culmination of gender differences manifested at various stages of the life course, including women’s greater likelihood to provide informal care (Jenson, 1997; Dahlberg, Demack and Bambra, 2007; Lewis, Campbell and Huerta, 2008; Evandrou et al., 2016), women’s increased risk of having interrupted employment records in order to provide such care (Ginn, Street and Arber, 2001; Evandrou and Glaser, 2003; Carmichael, Charles and Hulme, 2010; Lee and Tang, 2015; Proulx and Le Bourdais, 2014; Gomez-Leon et al., 2017) and women’s higher likelihood of retiring with nonexistent or inadequate pension arrangements in place (Ginn and Arber, 1998). The impact of such accumulation of risk over the life course can be further exacerbated as a result of pension systems which do little to recognise diversity in individuals’ working lives (Street and Ginn, 2001; Vlachantoni, 2012). Drawing on Fraser’s analysis of individuals’ differential resources in society, and the resultant effect on individuals’ socio-economic status, this chapter uses empirical evidence from the UK and beyond, in order to explore, firstly, the interaction of paid work and unpaid care on the one hand; and secondly, gender differentials in the way pension systems operate. The chapter critically discusses Fraser’s suggestion that resources, recognition and redistribution are all required in order to achieve social justice, and explores the ways in which the interaction of men’s and women’s life courses and the design of pension systems result in gender differentials in terms of income in later life, which are discussed in Section IV. The final section returns to the principles of resources, recognition and redistribution as fundamental cornerstones of a pension system designed for modern societies which values diversity in individuals’ life courses and offers an adequate valorisation of informal care provision. 2 Socio-economic inequalities in later life |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/417102/1/10.4324_9781315226835_11.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
