Educational and gender disparities in work, retirement, and disability-pension expectancies: a cross-country analysis of Italy and Finland.

objectivesWe examined how gender and education shape the distribution of life years spent in full-year or mid-to-low intensity employment, unemployment-inactivity, disability pension, and retirement in two countries with distinct welfare regimes, labor markets, and pension structures.

methodsUsing Finnish population registers and the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) data linked to administrative records for Italy, we followed individuals from 2005 to 2018 and applied discrete-time incidence-based multistate models. Through the estimated transition probabilities, we derived life expectancy at age 30 and years spent in different labor market states.

resultsTime spent in full-year employment in general was similar across both countries, but with larger differences by education in Finland and a larger gender gap in Italy. Italy experiences a prolonged time in unemployment or inactivity, particularly among women. Italy also has longer disability pension durations, while Finland has more years in retirement, but with substantial gender and educational differences. DISCUSSION: We advance existing knowledge by providing more granularity on years spent in employment and retirement and using multistate models on large-scale data. We revealed important gender and socioeconomic inequalities in labor market participation and retirement experiences. We also showed important cross-country differences, likely shaped by welfare regimes and labor market structures. These findings highlight the need for targeted policies addressing structural barriers: in Italy, to reduce gender gaps and fragmented careers, also limiting pension adequacy; in Finland, to address persistent educational inequalities in employment and retirement.