Gender segregation of older people: the case of Mediterranean countries

In the last years, economists and sociologists have been increasingly interested in segregation. Most of the empirical works examine the unequal distribution of different groups in the population, i.e. women and men, native and immigrant or black and white, along several dimensions such as access to job, education and neighborhoods, among others. Recently, there is also a growing interest in the multigroup cases. The purpose of this paper is to understand the life situation of aged people in Europe. Data come from three regular panel waves (wave1, wave2 and wave4) from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Focusing on the two-group case, women and men, we derive several segregation indices and provide segregation curves respect to two dimensions: employment and level of education. These curves allow us to derive a partial order for some Mediterranean countries; in particular, we focus on France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Further research will be conducted aiming at analyzing multigroup segregation, in particular investigating the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender and extending the results to all the European countries.