Gendered Profiles of Precarious Employment and Health Among Older Workers: A Latent Class Approach

As people across Europe live longer, the idea of working well into one's sixties and seventies has shifted from a rare exception to a central policy goal. Governments and pension systems are increasingly encouraging older adults to stay in the workforce, hoping this will support economic stability and personal well-being. However, simply extending the length of a career does not guarantee that the years added are good ones. For many, the later stages of working life are not a smooth continuation of a stable job, but a period marked by uncertainty. This uncertainty, often called precarious employment, involves more than just the fear of losing a job tomorrow. It encompasses a web of conditions: the quality of the work itself, the reliability of the income, the ability to learn new skills, and the security of the pension that will follow. When these elements are missing or weak, the result is not just a difficult job, but a situation that can erode a person's health. Understanding how these different pieces of insecurity fit together is crucial, because the experience of a worker in their fifties or sixties is often very different from that of a younger employee, and it is often shaped profoundly by gender.

A team of researchers from Tilburg University set out to map this complex landscape for workers aged fifty and older across twenty-seven European countries. Rather than looking at job insecurity as a single, simple problem, they treated it as a multidimensional reality. They gathered data from over twelve thousand people currently in paid work, asking detailed questions about their contracts, their hours, their income, their pension prospects, and how they felt about their daily work conditions. Using a sophisticated statistical method that groups people based on shared patterns rather than single traits, the researchers identified four distinct "profiles" or types of employment situations that older workers find themselves in. These groups are not just labels; they represent real, lived configurations of advantage and disadvantage that shape daily life and future security.

The first group, which the researchers call "Privileged," represents the ideal scenario. These workers hold stable, full-time jobs with permanent contracts. They report high job satisfaction, feel they have control over their tasks, and are confident about their future pensions. They are the most likely to have high levels of education and are predominantly men. At the other end of the spectrum are the "Peripheral" workers. This group is the most financially vulnerable, often working part-time with short-term contracts and low incomes. Their social safety nets are fragmented, leaving them with little pension security. What makes this group distinct is that their work itself might not be terrible; some even report good working conditions. However, their attachment to the labor market is weak, and they are disproportionately women.

Between these two extremes lie two other groups that reveal the nuance of precariousness. The "Standard" workers make up the largest share of the sample. They have stable, full-time employment and decent financial security, though they do not enjoy the high levels of autonomy or career prospects of the privileged group. The fourth group, the "Strained" workers, presents a particularly troubling picture. These individuals are often working full-time and may even have permanent contracts, yet they face high levels of stress, low rewards, and poor opportunities for career advancement. They feel trapped in jobs that demand a lot but offer little in return, with limited prospects for skill development or a secure pension.

The study found that these employment profiles are not distributed evenly across society; they are deeply gendered. While men are more likely to fall into the Standard or Privileged categories, women are overwhelmingly concentrated in the disadvantaged groups. In fact, eighty-five percent of the workers in the most financially vulnerable "Peripheral" group are women. This disparity highlights how a lifetime of career interruptions, part-time work, and lower wages accumulates to create a specific type of insecurity for older women. The "Strained" group also contains a higher proportion of women than men, suggesting that even when women manage to stay in full-time roles, they are more likely to face high-pressure, low-reward conditions.

Perhaps most significantly, the researchers found that these employment profiles are directly linked to physical and mental health. Workers in the "Strained" and "Peripheral" categories reported significantly poorer health outcomes than their counterparts in the Standard or Privileged groups. The mental toll was particularly heavy for the "Strained" workers, who showed the highest levels of depressive symptoms. This suggests that the combination of high job demands and low control is a potent recipe for psychological distress. For the "Peripheral" workers, the health risks seem to stem more from financial insecurity and the lack of a safety net. The study confirms that precarious employment is not merely a matter of having a temporary contract; it is a broader state of vulnerability that can manifest as high stress in a stable job or as financial fragility in a part-time one.

The research also challenges the notion that precariousness is a single, uniform experience that gets worse in a straight line. Instead, the data shows that insecurity comes in different shapes. A worker can be financially secure but psychologically strained, or they can be working full-time but feel completely unprotected regarding their future. These different configurations matter because they affect health in different ways. The study does not claim to prove that these jobs cause the health problems, as the data was collected at a single point in time. However, the strong association between these specific employment patterns and poor health suggests that the quality of work in later life is a critical determinant of well-being.

Ultimately, the findings suggest that policies aimed at extending working lives must look beyond the simple goal of keeping people employed. If the goal is to ensure that older workers can remain active and healthy, the focus must shift to the quality of that employment. For women, in particular, the data reveals a system where structural inequalities accumulate over a lifetime, leaving them disproportionately exposed to the most damaging forms of job insecurity. By identifying these distinct profiles, the researchers have provided a clearer picture of what it means to work in old age today, showing that for many, the path to retirement is not a smooth transition, but a struggle against a combination of financial, social, and psychological pressures that can compromise their health.