“I’m actually having way too much fun.”<br />The arc of women’s working lives is changing — reaching higher levels when they’re younger and stretching out much longer — according to two new analyses of census, earnings and retirement data<br />that provide the most comprehensive look yet at women’s career paths.<br />But most of the time, Ms. Goldin and Mr. Katz found, women are working longer<br />because of decisions they made much earlier in their lives — to get an education and spend years building a career.<br />Of those still working, Ms. Goldin said, “They’re in occupations in which they really have an identity.” She added, “Women have more education, they’re in jobs<br />that are more fulfilling, and they stay with them.” (Ms. Goldin happens to be an example of the phenomenon, as a 70-year-old professor and researcher.)<br />And I love the joy of getting that big commission check.”<br />There is just one period of life when women are less likely to be working than in previous generations: their late 30s<br />and early 40s, according to the other new paper, by Ms. Goldin and Joshua Mitchell, a senior economist at the Census Bureau.<br />Of women born between 1945 and 1949, about 50 percent in all education groups were working at age 64, compared with 60 percent of college graduates.<br />That means that even if they take breaks to care of children, they are likely to return to work and to work past a typical retirement age.<br />If people work when they’re younger, economists say, they’re more likely to work when they’re older.<br />Nearly 30 percent of women 65 to 69 are working, up from 15 percent in the late 1980s, one<br />of the analyses, by the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, found.
