Austria [chapter]

Barbara Haas, Michaela Gstrein, Roland Bildsteiner
2020 Extended Working Life Policies  
This chapter deals with the labour market situation of older (50+) workers and pension policies in Austria, a country where gender differences are strongly pronounced over the entire lifecourse. The target of recent policies is not primarily to tackle the negative effects of the system for women, but to decrease pension costs by discouraging early retirement and inducing employers to keep and/or employ older workers. However, this will have some gendered effects since recent policy changes will
more » ... increase women's lower legal retirement age stepwise (60) to match that of men (65) in 2033. Although caring time already partly contributes to pension payments, this does not substantially decrease the large gender pension gap. Men and women tend to follow different educational and employment paths leading to gender segregated labour markets and to large gender pay and pension gaps. Due to the long tradition of the modified male breadwinner model in Austria, men work continuously full-time while women, especially mothers, tend to exit the labour market for several years after childbirth and re-enter into, more or less family-friendly part-time jobs.
doi:10.1007/978-3-030-40985-2_8 fatcat:3y5nfkd65nfuxjn2wfrbt4sg2u