This study examines gender differences in postretirement employment, using the first eight waves of Health and Retirement Study data. Gender is shown to be an important factor in understanding transitions into postretirement employment. Forty-seven percent of retirees ( n = 3,590) experienced postretirement employment, with 43% of retired women making the transition, compared with 50% of retired men. Marital status, earnings, and household wealth were significant only when gender interaction terms were introduced due to countervailing effects by gender. For women, being married and having high household wealth were negatively associated, and higher earnings positively associated, with labor force reentry; for men, wealth and earnings had the opposite effect. Hazard models show that divorced and separated women have a greater likelihood of labor force reentry than married women and that this difference increases with time out of the labor force, suggesting push factors that derive from economic vulnerability.

The stereotypical retirement experience -the abrupt ceasing of all paid work and commencement of a life of leisure -is the experience of only half of all workers. Yet, despite the prevalence of combining work and retirement in the US and the implications this work-retirement behavior may have for organizations and individual workers, post-retirement employment behavior is understudied. In this article, we add to the growing literature on retirement and late-life employment processes by examining the trends and correlates of post-retirement employment in the US from 1977 to 2009. We find a modest curvilinear trend in post-retirement employment for both males and females over the last 33 years. However, the modest upward trends in post-retirement employment obscure the countervailing influences of significant changes in behavior and in the macro-level demographic and economic forces that are significant determinants of post-retirement employment.

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