Drawing on the author's expertise and the personal Social Security stories of real women, this book opens the door on how Social Security works for women regardless of your life's journey. It's for you if you're married, divorced, widowed, or single and will take some of the mystery out of this complex yet critical income source.

Today, more American women than ever before stay in the workforce into their sixties and seventies. This trend emerged in the 1980s, and has persisted during the past three decades, despite substantial changes in macroeconomic conditions. Why is this so? Today’s older American women work full-time jobs at greater rates than women in other developed countries. In Women Working Longer, editors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz assemble new research that presents fresh insights on the phenomenon of working longer. Their findings suggest that education and work experience earlier in life are connected to women’s later-in-life work. Other contributors to the volume investigate additional factors that may play a role in late-life labor supply, such as marital disruption, household finances, and access to retirement benefits. A pioneering study of recent trends in older women’s labor force participation, this collection offers insights valuable to a wide array of social scientists, employers, and policy makers.

As populations age and revenues diminish, government and private pension funds around the world are facing insolvency. The looming social security crisis is especially dire for women, who live longer than men but have worked less in the formal labor force. This groundbreaking study examines alternative social security systems and their disparate impacts on men and women. Emphasis is placed on the new multi-pillar systems that combine a publicly managed benefit and a mandatory private retirement saving plan. The Gender Impact of Social Security Reform compares the gendered outcomes of social security systems in Chile, Argentina, and Mexico, and presents empirical findings from Eastern and Central European transition economies as well as several OECD countries. Women’s positions have improved relative to men in countries where joint pensions have been required, widows who have worked can keep the joint pension in addition to their own benefit, the public benefit has been targeted toward low earners, and women’s retirement age has been raised to equality with that of men. The Gender Impact of Social Security Reform will force economists and policy makers to reexamine the design features that enable social security systems to achieve desirable gender outcomes.

Current debates concerning the future of social security provision in advanced capitalist states have raised the issue of a citizen’s basic income (CBI) as a possible reform package: a proposal based on the principles of individuality, universality and unconditionality which would ensure a minimum income guaranteed for all members of society. Implementing a CBI, would consequently entail radical reform of existing patterns of welfare delivery and would bring into question the institutionalized relationship between work and welfare. Ailsa McKay’s book makes a unique and positive contribution to the CBI literature by examining the proposal from a feminist economics perspective. Gender concerns are central to any debate on the future of social security policy, in that state intervention in the field of income redistribution has differential impacts on men and women. By drawing attention to the potential a CBI has in promoting equal rights of freedom for men and women this book serves to open up the debate to incorporate a more realistic and inclusive vision of the nature of modern socio-economic relationships.

In developed countries, men’s labor force participation at older ages has increased in recent years, reversing a decades-long pattern of decline. Participation rates for older women have also been rising. What explains these patterns, and the differences in them across countries? The answers to these questions are pivotal as countries face fiscal and retirement security challenges posed by longer life-spans. This eighth phase of the International Social Security project, which compares the social security and retirement experiences of twelve developed countries, documents trends in participation and employment and explores reasons for the rising participation rates of older workers. The chapters use a common template for analysis, which facilitates comparison of results across countries. Using within-country natural experiments and cross-country comparisons, the researchers study the impact of improving health and education, changes in the occupation mix, the retirement incentives of social security programs, and the emergence of women in the workplace, on labor markets. The findings suggest that social security reforms and other factors such as the movement of women into the labor force have played an important role in labor force participation trends.

The United States social security system is the nation's largest social insurance program. As such, it has a far-reaching impact throughout the economy, influencing not only old-age economic security but also many behaviors, including corporate employment policy, retirement patterns, and personal saving. In the past, the system's universal coverage and generous benefits ensured popular support to a degree enjoyed by no other form of "big government" social spending. Yet over two-thirds of all Americans today believe that the social security system will face bankruptcy by the time they retire. The question of social security reform—how to reform the system or whether the system needs reform at all—is the subject of heated debate at all levels of government, in the media, and among workers, pensioners, and employers. Prospects for Social Security Reform informs the debate by exploring why the system is at a crossroads today and what to do about it. Contributors detail the size and nature of the problem, explain views of key "stakeholders" regarding reform options, and report new evidence on how reform might affect the economy. Research findings and public opinion polls are analyzed, as are lessons from other countries experimenting with new ways to deliver old-age benefit promises. No other volume includes as diverse and expert a set of perspectives on reform and privatization as those gathered here from economists, actuaries, employers, investment managers, and representatives of organized labor. Among its chapters is the path-breaking study "Social Security Money's Worth," the 1999 winner of the TIAA-CREF's Paul A. Samuelson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Writing on Lifelong Financial Security.