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This paper improves the understanding of how prior life-courses that unfold over several decades relate to inequalities between groups in old age. Economic inequality in old age results from many processes that unfold over individuals’ prior life-courses in given institutional settings. With population aging, such economic inequalities in mature adulthood and old age become increasingly relevant. We propose a step wise process combining the strengths of Multichannel Sequence Analysis to analyse life-courses with the Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, which has long been established to analyse group inequalities in outcomes. To illustrate the proposed procedure, we apply it to the case of Gender Pension Gaps in Italy and West Germany. Our analysis reveals that a large part of the gap in both countries is due to highly gender-specific work-family patterns; male-typical life courses receive higher average pension income while female-typical life courses are worse rewarded. On the other hand, only a minor share of the gap is associated with different pension rewards of men and women with the same work-family life course pattern. Thus, we do not find evidence for redistributional measures of pension systems (e.g. care benefits) leading to higher pension incomes of women compared to men within the same life course clusters and thus to a significant reduction of the Gender Pension Gap. We contribute to the literatures on gender inequality, life-course processes, and comparative analysis of old age pensions by showing how combined work and family life-courses lead to different gender pension gaps in two countries.

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