Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2013

International differences in health in older age are well-documented. Research on factors explaining these differences has not done justice to possible differences in factors related to ‘gender-regimes’. Data for this study were harmonised in the framework of the Comparison of Longitudinal European Studies on Aging (CLESA) project, which included population-based studies from Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy Read More

Even though labour market participation of older women and men has been increasing all over Europe during the last few decades there are still major differences by country and by gender. This article discusses the relation between these differences in labour market participation and institutional arrangements in the field of the activation of senior people and pension reforms in various European welfare states. One m Read More

The third age is a concept popularised by British social-historian Peter Laslett. It refers to an idyllic stage in the life course in which individuals are freed from work and family obligations, while having the means and health to pursue life goals. I argue that differences between men and women in the extent to which they provide of informal care, render gender inequality in the likelihood of experiencing a third age as described b Read More

We explore how psychologists have incorporated gender and power into their explorations of third age women’s identities. Our systematic search revealed that only a few studies explicitly referred to the third age as a distinct phase of late adulthood. However, taking the chronological age of 56-75 years as a proxy for the third age, we identified relevant studies, adopting either a senescing, life-span development, socialpsycho Read More

Old age poverty, especially amongst women, is a serious risk that is barely addressed. Today about two-third of older people are living in Asia, Latin-America of Africa and this is estimated to rise to close to 80% by 2050, about 1.6 billion older people. Though many governments in these regions are working on the development of social security, currently, over half of older people worldwide – 342 million – lack income security. An Read More

The South-African writer and poet Antjie Krog (1952) became very well-known because of highly personal accounts of the political and social situation in her motherland. In her poetry Krog tends to be even more personal, with her lyrical subjects aging together with her, following her own lifeline. The female body is a recurring theme in her poetry. The collection of poetry Verweerskrif (2006, Body Bereft in English, Lijfkreet Read More