March 1, 2022

When workers develop disabilities on the job, it often has some connection to where they live.

Musculoskeletal conditions like arthritis and tendinitis can happen anywhere but are especially prevalent in a swath surrounding the Kentucky-West Virginia border and running south to Alabama. Intellectual disabilities and mood disorders like autism and depression are common in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.

The hot spots, described in new research, represent areas that fall in the top 10 percent of all the areas with awards for the specific condition in many of the years studied, 2005 through 2018.

New Hampshire is a dramatic example: all 10 designated areas of the state were identified as hot spots for awards based on mental disorders in all 14 years.

In addition to mental and musculoskeletal conditions, the researchers from Mathematica found a third major hot spot for circulatory and respiratory disorders like heart disease and asthma. These disorders are prevalent in an area that starts in Indiana and Illinois and flows down the Mississippi River to Mississippi.

The explanations for the hot spots are myriad and complex. Musculoskeletal disabilities constitute the largest single type of benefit award – a third of the U.S. total – and hot spots in the Southeast, where coal mining, agriculture and manufacturing are dominant, tend to have older, less educated populations and more veterans. …Learn More

Behavior

December 9, 2021

Men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. That continues to hold true in retirement.

A new study that examines two aspects of this major life change – personal and financial relationships – finds that men and women use their newfound freedom in different ways.

The change in men’s social lives after they retire is more dramatic because they greatly expand their network of friends, adult children, and extended family, and they have more conversations with them about personal matters.

Men “become more dependent on family,” concludes research by two University of Wisconsin sociologists.

Retirement doesn’t mark the same type of social shift for women, however. They already had a larger network and always took more responsibility for maintaining relationships, and not much changes in retirement – with one exception. Women increase the number of hours spent taking care of their grandchildren.

The differences are consistent across much of the western world, according to this study, which was based on surveys in the United States and Europe – from Sweden to Spain to Estonia. Although married and single people participated in the survey, the heart of the analysis was asking each individual this question:

“Looking back over the last 12 months, who are the people with whom you most often discussed things that are important to you?” Each individual listed up to five people in their networks, the nature of the relationships, and how often they are in contact.

In addition to branching out socially, retired men are more likely to give money to offspring or other family members. In married couples, this is often jointly decided by husband and wife. But the actual money transfers picked up only after the men – and not the women – retired and had more energy to devote to family. …Learn More

Field Work

June 24, 2021

Women attend college at higher rates than men. Women’s labor force participation was also fairly steady prior to COVID, while men’s declined, and women continue to move into fields traditionally held by men.

Despite all this progress, women still earn much less than men.

Discrimination partly explains the pay gap, as does motherhood, which can interrupt the smooth progression in women’s careers at a critical time. But another explanation doesn’t get as much attention: women earn less because they’re not as confident as men about how much they can get and are more afraid of taking some risks in negotiations with employers.

In the 2018 and 2019 graduating classes at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, women started their job searches earlier and accepted employers’ offers more quickly, according to a new analysis of student surveys before graduation and after they’d landed a job.

Men, on the other hand, do take risks, extending the negotiation with employers to see how much they can secure or even rejecting a job in hopes that a better one comes along.

Prior to graduating, nearly two-thirds of the women in BU’s business school had accepted a job during their junior or senior years but only about half of the men had, the researchers found.

The male students also enter their pay negotiations with higher expectations of what they want to earn. Their optimism, verging on overconfidence, serves them well. Male graduates from the BU business school earned about $6,700 more, on average, than their female classmates.

Men’s natural advantages in two psychological attributes – optimism and a willingness to take risks – “play a non-trivial role in generating early career earnings gaps among the highly skilled,” the study concluded. …Learn More

April 8, 2021

The annual pay for a plumber in Omaha, Nebraska, with three years of experience is around $55,000 a year, while a certified nursing assistant there earns $30,000. Or compare an electrician in the Phoenix area making $62,000 to $39,000 for a dental assistant.

Recognizing that many of the occupations dominated by women don’t pay well, young women of color are increasingly moving into the construction trades. Black, Latina, and Asian women and women of mixed race account for 45 percent of the 308,000 women working in the trades. This exceeds their 38 percent share of the women’s labor force overall, according to an analysis of 2016-2018 data by Ariane Hegewisch of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. The largest group is Latina women.

Women of color are gravitating to construction jobs – carpenter, electrician, laborer, plumber, mason, painter, and metal worker – because they offer paid apprenticeships, good pay, and benefits to workers who don’t have a college degree. The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades even has maternity leave.

Being a sheet metal worker has “given me the financial ability to take care of my family,” Monica Yamada, a member of Local 104 in San Francisco, said in a recent webinar hosted by the policy institute and Chicago Women in Trades.

But working in a man’s world is challenging. Women say they often feel marginalized or harassed, or they receive fewer opportunities for career-advancing training or assignments at the construction site. “Women must fight to advance and to learn new aspects of the trade that men automatically get to do,” said the institute’s study director, Chandra Childers. …Learn More

Behavior

March 11, 2021

For most of the 20^th century, life expectancy was on the rise. Yet older Americans were retiring at younger and younger ages. That changed in the 1990s. Life expectancy continued to rise, but retirement ages started increasing too.

Many significant developments are behind the dramatic shift in retirement habits, including the decline of private-sector pensions, changing attitudes about working women, and bigger financial incentives from Social Security for people who remain in the labor force in order to get a larger monthly check when they finally retire.

Given all of these changes, Urban Institute researchers wondered whether the dramatic longevity gains experienced by the people who make it to their 50s and 60s could be counted as another reason for the delayed retirement trend.

Their evidence suggests that growing lifespans are keeping men over age 55 in the labor force longer and postponing their retirement, particularly in areas with strong job markets and more opportunity.

But women’s behavior was much more nuanced. Their labor force participation also increased, but only for women under 65 and to a much smaller extent than men. For the oldest women in the study – ages 65 to 74 – the results were puzzling to the researchers because labor force participation actually declined with life expectancy for those in the bottom half of the income distribution. …Learn More

December 1, 2020

Last spring, as COVID-19 tore through the nation’s nursing homes, many people agonized over whether to pull their elderly parents out and assume responsibility for the care.

The fall surge in the virus is no doubt causing more handwringing as adult children again weigh the challenges of home care against concerns about their parents’ physical and mental well-being.

One practical consideration is the impact on the work lives of parental caregivers, who are overwhelmingly women. Recent research has found that “there are long-term costs associated with caregiving reflected in [lower] earnings even long after caregiving has taken place.”

The research involved women in their 50s and 60s with at least one living parent or in-law, though they generally provided care to a parent rather than an in-law.

Workers sometimes downshift their careers in the years prior to retiring, but caregiving can affect whether older women work at all, the researchers found. Among the caregivers they followed, the share who were working fell by nearly 2 percentage points, to about 56 percent, after their duties began. And the caregivers who remained employed worked fewer hours after taking on a parent’s care.

Women also earned less over the long-term if they had spent time as a caregiver. They saw about a 15 percent decline in their earnings by the age of 65 – or nearly $1,800 per year, on average – according to an update of a study initially funded by the Social Security Administration with subsequent funding from the Sloan Foundation. …Learn More

November 24, 2020

How often do you eat red meat? Do you exercise regularly? Cancer in your family? Did you go to college?

These questions – among the varied and complex predictors of longevity – are packed into a calculator that will estimate how long you could live. The calculator was created by Dr. Thomas Perls, an expert on longevity and the genetics of aging at Boston University.

Articles about the links between longevity and diet and lifestyle are perennial fodder for the popular press and health magazines. But Dr. Perls’ research dives deeper – into genetics.

In his work with geneticists, statisticians and computer scientists, he has studied the connections between genetics and people with exceptional longevity – nonagenerians (people living into their 90s), centenarians (living past 100), and super-centenarians (living past 110). His research has predicted, with a high level of accuracy, who makes it to the most advanced old ages based on hundreds of their genetic markers.

An interesting finding for women’s longevity involves the age their children were born: “Twenty percent of female centenarians had children after the age of 40 compared with 5 percent of [all] women from their birth cohort,” according to Dr. Perls.

His calculator also asks about attitude, specifically whether you’re aging well or dreading old age. Indeed, some research has found that optimism may contribute to a long life. Ike Newcomer, who was 107 when AARP shot the above video a few years ago, revealed a sunny disposition.

“I can’t really think of which was my best day,” Newcomer said. “They were all good.”

Dr. Perls’ calculator gave me some good news – I could live to 95. It would be nice if I take after my maternal grandmother, two of her brothers, my maternal great grandfather and a couple of great great aunts. All of them lived well into their 90s.

How long will you live? It takes just a few minutes to use the calculator – try it, if you dare. …Learn More