Why more women are postponing retirement in the US

An increasing number of older Americans who work longer. Women explain much of the phenomenon, new research suggests.

People over 65 and even 70 years working are not as rare as before in the US; just ask Hillary Clinton, 68, or Donald Trump, 70.

Today Americans are more likely to work after 65 years than at any time since the creation of the health insurance system Medicare in the 1960s - but most are men, accustomed to working already very old.

(Just remember to Carl Icahn, who still moves the market with their activism in investments to 80, or Warren Buffett, who at age 86 leads Berkshire Hathaway, a $ 360 billion company).

Today more women work up to ages at which their mothers and grandmothers had already retired had enough time. Economists and other scholars try to understand the reasons and research suggests that the trend will continue and may accelerate.

One of the first work of the factors in old age is the level of education: men and women with higher education are more likely to work after 65 or in their 70s than the less educated Americans. And the number of graduates at the university is increasing.

The job history itself also influences. The rapid increase in the number of women in the labor market in the 1970s and 1980s made these women, now older, have labor skills, connections and careers that can keep chasing.

As the baby boomers (members of the generation born after World War II) older begin to reach age 70, they are not only working, but are increasingly working full time.

Almost half of women working after the age of 65 are in full-time jobs and during the year, compared to about 30 percent 20 years ago, discovered the economics professors at Harvard University Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz in a new search .

One of the main factors by which women are postponing retirement is that they like their jobs, said Goldin and Katz, who analyzed survey data linked to retirement pay records.

"As jobs become more pleasant and less costly and various positions become part of the individual's identity, women work longer," they wrote.

Children, on the other hand, do not influence the work of both women up to 65 years or more, Goldin and Katz found. Having children makes difficult the permanence of women in the labor market full time between 25 and 44 years - something that Goldin and Katz attributed in part to the fact parental leave of more than 12 weeks is not mandatory in the US - but It does not affect their participation at a later point in life.

Although these mothers can end up earning less than if they had not had children, they seem to be restarting the interrupted careers when their children are older.