Why women leave earlier: what is behind the earlier labour market exit of women in the Czech Republic

The article examines the factors that intervene in decisions to leave the labour market in the Czech Republic from a gender perspective. It uses binary logistic regression to identify the variables that predict the economic inactivity of men and women at the age of 60 plus and the interactions of variables to examine whether the factors that determine when people exit the labour market are the same for men and women. The analysis uses data from the Labour Force Study (LFS) collected in the fourth quarter of 2017 and focuses on people between the ages of 60 and 69 and five independent variables: gender, education, pension eligibility, marital status, and type of job. It studies how gender intersects with other characteristics in the decision to retire from the labour market. Although pension eligibility is the central predictor of economic inactivity after the age of 60, when eligibility is controlled for here, it is evident that gender, education, job type, and marital status all influence the timing of labour market exits. Women leave work earlier than men, and this is found to be true even when we control for their education or pension eligibility. They are also more likely than men to leave work even if they are not yet eligible to collect a pension. The effect of education is not as straightforward for women as for men: women with the lowest and with the highest levels of education are more likely to continue to work than men with the same educational attainment. Policies to prolong people's working lives may thus have a different impact on each gender.