Gender, work, and retirement: the impact of working and family trajectories on women's later life outcomes.

The aim of this thesis is to explore different aspects of the female retirement process. Adopting a life-course perspective, this study investigates the development of women's life course to understand the influence of previous life experience on different dimensions of the retirement process itself. More specifically, the thesis consists of three contributions; the first one aims to analyse the influence that the career trajectories have on female retirement timing, in three different European countries (Italy, Germany and Denmark); the second contribution aims to understand the effects of the retirement transition on female life satisfaction, depending on the working pathways. Finally, the third contribution focuses on the influence of work-family life trajectories on life satisfaction in retirement. Empirically, I analyse longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). In the first contribution, I observed a negative and significant probability of retirement for the discontinuous and part-time working trajectories compared to the full-time one, in Italy. In Germany and particularly in Denmark, no substantial differences were found between the working pathways in terms of retirement timing. In the second contribution, I found that some of the working trajectories constituted by discontinuity or part-time periods, showed a continuous increase in life satisfaction, passing from employment (or unemployment) to retirement. For other working trajectories, such as the full-time one, retirement seems to not have implications for subjective wellbeing. In the third contribution, the results show that all the life course trajectories characterized by part-time work show a higher general level of life satisfaction compared to the other pathways (discontinuous or full-time ones). Moreover, a part-time trajectory was associated with higher life satisfaction in retirement when combined with a stable marriage and two children, than when it was coupled with one child or three or more children.