Abstract
In this paper, we focus on Palestinian-Arab women in Israel to study how their retirement timing decision is affected by the labor market and by broader family characteristics. Our unique case study in a labor market with gender and ethnic marginalization allows us to understand the interconnections between the structure of work opportunities, cultural scripts, and the agency of women and their families. We provide quantitative evidence from the Israeli Labor Force Survey that Palestinian-Arab women in Israel retire early, before the age of 50, despite the improvement in their education. We build on these findings with qualitative research and conduct twenty semi-structured interviews with early retirees. We explore evidence of push and pull factors leading to early retirement; while the push factors are linked to the precarious nature of women’s position in the labor force, the pull factors are related to women’s changing role in the domestic work sphere.
Keywords:
Participation in the labor market, Palestinian Arab women, gender marginalization, early retirement.
