Couples’ Work/Retirement Transitions, Gender, and Marital Quality*

55 Retirement typically has been studied as an individual, principally male status passage, although its effects ripple across family relationships (Szinovacz 1989; Szinovacz and Ekerdt 1995).Today, however, almost half the contemporary workforce is female and the majority of workers are now married to other workers. These trends are strongly affecting both scholarly and cultural conceptualizations of retirement as a life course transition. Gender has become a key source of heterogeneity in the nature and effects of the retirement process: gendered life scripts and options produce distinctive life course patterns for men and for women. First, women and men follow different career paths to and through retirement: women workers in late midlife are less likely to have worked continuously (Han and Moen 1999a, 1999b). Women also tend to experience retirement differently as a consequence of these differences in trajectories and of gendered expectations (Moen 1996; Quick and Moen 1998; Smith and Moen 1998; Szinovacz 1989; Szinovacz, Ekerdt, and Vinick 1992; Vinick and Ekerdt 1991, 1992). Second, couples increasingly must deal with two retirements rather than only the husband’s (Henretta and O’Rand 1983; Henretta, O’Rand, and Chan 1993a, 1993b; O’Rand, Henretta, and Krecker 1992). This raises the issue of synchronizing spouses’ career exits. Yet even synchronization is a gendered process: women’s retirement is often contingent on that of their husbands (Quick and Moen 1998). Another key life course consideration is the changing nature of retirement.This status passage is now “longer and fuzzier” (Kohli and Rein 1991; also see Settersten and Meyer 1997), as retirees from primary career jobs increasingly take up second or third Couples’ Work/Retirement Transitions, Gender, and Marital Quality*