There are profound implications for every business in the travel industry in this fact: The U.S. labor force is aging, and more of those older workers are women.
Sara Rix has addressed workforce-related aging issues for 35 years. In her current position as a senior strategic policy advisor with the AARP Public Policy Institute, Rix focuses on the economics of aging, labor force and demographic trends, employment and retirement policy, and older-worker employment issues.
“We've looked a great deal at the reasons people are motivated to continue working at older ages, and we've also looked at what older workers bring to the workplace,” Rix told Travel Weekly PLUS.
Rix shared information and insights from her storehouse of research and data about the aging U.S. workforce with Travel Weekly PLUS Editor in Chief Diane Merlino.
Merlino: What characteristics of the older workforce demographic should employers keep in mind?
Rix: The most important thing to understand is that the workforce has aged significantly in recent years, and it's going to continue aging. The oldest of the baby boomers hit 67 this year, and we've got a huge number of older workers that are creeping up to age 65.
The number of older people remaining in the labor force has increased dramatically in recent decades. That trend is absolutely phenomenal, and employers can expect more of it.
Merlino: Sara, throw some numbers at us that illustrate important trends and patterns in this growing older workforce.
Rix: Let’s take just the age group 65 to 69, which until recently was traditionally considered the retirement-age population. Age 65 was the age of eligibility for full Social Security benefits, and most people were out of the labor force by that age or well before. Now, the age of full eligibility has gone up to 66, and will go up to 67. But in recent years, there's been a shift in the previous pattern of ever-earlier retirement.
For just that single age group, the labor force participation rate has risen from 21% in 1990 to 32.1% in 2012. That’s a really sizeable increase, particularly in light of the post-war trend toward ever-earlier retirement, and there's been a greater increase among women. Whether you look at 65-plus, 65 to 69, or 70 to 74, right now older women are less likely than men of a comparable age to be in the workforce, but their labor force participation rate is increasing in most age groups at a faster rate.
Merlino: Why is participation in the labor force by older women increasing?
Rix: There are a number of factors that explain it, and some of them are similar to the factors that explain why men are remaining in the workforce longer. Of course, older women today differ somewhat from older women of tomorrow. Today’s older women — at least those women who have been married and had children — have had intermittent work careers.
More of tomorrow’s older women will have had a lifetime of full employment with less time out of the labor force. There are also growing numbers of single women who have never been married moving into their 60s and beyond. Many of them — not all of them by a long shot — are professional, well-educated women and the better educated a person is, the more likely he or she is to stay in the labor force.
Like older well-educated men, older well-educated women like what they're doing. They've got responsible jobs, and they are making a contribution, and that's a factor in a longer or prolonged work life.
Merlino: So the workforce is becoming older, and it’s becoming more female. What are the implications of those trends for the business world?
Rix: There are implications in terms of the types of benefits that employers might consider providing if they want to 
attract or retain valued older women or men. More flexible work schedules may be of particular interest to women who want to remain in the labor force longer.
There are also implications for people who are marketing to older Americans in terms of the products and services that might be more valuable to the older female population.
Merlino: Why are people staying in the workforce longer?
Rix: In our surveys, when it’s a free-form response, people give financial reasons about as frequently as non-financial reasons. They say they need the money and they need the healthcare, and in this society healthcare is heavily dependent on having an employer. But they also like what they're doing. They want to make a contribution, and they like the social aspects of employment. So there are nonfinancial reasons as well.
But when we ask them for the main reason they are working, financial reasons do rise to the top, and that's especially the case more recently. We started surveying the boomers in 1998, and when we asked them what they planned to do in retirement 80% of them said they expected to work in retirement.
Merlino: So even before the most recent recession, a significant majority of boomers said they expected to work in retirement?
Rix: The recession reinforced the trends that were already occurring in terms of prolonged working lives. In 2011 we did another survey, and about the same percentage said they expected to work at least part-time in retirement. But the percentage saying they were planning on working for financial reasons increased while the percentage saying they were going to be working largely for nonfinancial reasons decreased.
Merlino: How is that shift in the reasons for continuing to work significant?
Rix: This is a big issue. Uncertainty about the economy is something older workers keep in mind, and it’s affecting their decisions about work and retirement.
There was the wild stock market that we experienced. Those who are fortunate enough to have money in 401K plans or the stock market saw saw their investments decline. Hopefully most of them have seen a return to earlier levels, but they have no control over what the market is going to do.
They have no control over housing values either, and much wealth in the older population is in their housing. Even those who didn't actually lose money saw their economic security decline as a result of a decline in the amount of money they thought they could access if they wanted to sell their home.
There is a great deal of uncertainty about what's going to happen. But they have more control over continuing to work than over a lot of other variables that affect their financial situation.
NEXT ISSUE: AARP’s Sara Rix on the changing face of older workers, and what they want from employers.