Working past the age of retirement may improve your life satisfaction

Many people look forward to retirement, but continuing to work in later life may benefit your well-being – particularly if you are a man.

People are increasingly retiring later in life. A report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that 28.9 per cent of 65 to 69 year olds across its 38 member states were still working in 2023, up from 15.9 per cent in 2000. But the impact of this on people’s happiness is little understood.

To get a grasp on the subject, Alisa Lewin at the University of Haifa and Haya Stier at Tel Aviv University, both in Israel, looked at social survey data collected by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. They then compared the experiences of more than 3300 women and just over 2000 men who had reached their respective retirement ages of 62 and 67.

The pair found that both men and women were more likely to work full time if they had a lower household income. But the men who did so also rated their economic, family, emotional and general life satisfaction as equal to or even higher than those who didn’t work at all.

This was true regardless of the type of full-time work the men did. Meanwhile, the women only ever experienced improvements in family and economic satisfaction, and only if they held a professional, technical or managerial job.

The researchers say this could be because women may get more of a sense of purpose and fulfillment from other aspects of life. “Women might have other sources of emotional support or social engagement, so they don’t get it from work, they get it from somewhere else,” says Lewin.

“Men, even now, still perceive their role as looking after the family and achieving success at work – and it doesn’t just stop at 65 [the age people used to be forced to retire in the UK],” says Cary Cooper at the University of Manchester, UK.

The results were more mixed when assessing the well-being of participants who worked part time, with the results varying according to the type of job and how satisfaction is measured, as well as whether the participant was a man or a woman.

People whose initial well-being was good could be more inclined to work full time later in life, which might have swayed the findings. The results may also not apply to other countries or cultures, says Cooper.