Ageing and Society (2024), 1–25
doi:10.1017/S0144686X2400045X

ARTICLE

Older women’s constructions of equality over
the lifecourse
Alice Beban , Vicky Walters, Nicole Ashley and Trudie Cain

School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand
Corresponding author: Alice Beban; Email: a.beban@massey.ac.nz

(Accepted 30 July 2024)

Abstract
Gender and age are central organising principles of social relations, with socially con-
structed gendered and age-based norms influencing patterns of social behaviour, power and
inequality. Despite recent literature highlighting the importance of subjective measures of
equality, including as a significant predictor of wellbeing, there is a gap in studies focused on
subjective equality in research on ageing. Drawing on an equality ranking exercise and life
herstory interviews with 20 older-aged women (65+) in Aotearoa New Zealand, this article
focuses on the intersectionality of age and gender, analysing the ways in which participants
constructed their experiences of equality over the lifecourse from their standpoint as older-
aged women. The analysis reveals a significant rise in subjective equality from childhood to
older age, with more varied responses in childhood and a convergence of responses from
adolescence onwards. Participants’ constructions of equality differed: age was the dominant
construct of equality women ascribed to their childhood years, while gender inequality
came to the fore during their teenage years. In early to mid-adulthood, women found ways
to navigate gendered inequality in various life domains, while in older adulthood equality
was constructed as freedom and life satisfaction. This trajectory suggests that the frames
individuals use to make sense of equality and their personal experiences are not fixed; they
are fluid and shift throughout the lifecourse.

Keywords: Aotearoa New Zealand; feminist gerontology; gender; lifecourse; subjective equality

Introduction
Social science literature on gender and ageing is well developed and there is widespread
agreement that the ‘problem’ of age is culturally constructed, with different timelines
and expectations for men and women (Grant 2011). Age establishes a particular age
order, determining one’s political location (Twigg 2013), and is one reason for discrim-
inatory and oppressive practices (Calasanti 2009; Calasanti and Slevin 2006). Similarly,
gender relations shape the possibilities open to people as gendered subjects (Nayak and
Kehily 2008). In dominant Western narratives, older women occupy an ambivalent
position. They may feel a sense of shame towards ageing, worrying about decay and
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2 Alice Beban et al.

decline and that they are no longer seen by some as women, and thus seek to remain
youthful (Bouson, 2016), or theymay embrace a discourse of freedom, and try out new
forms of sexuality and agency in their relationships (Earhart 2019). While transforma-
tions in gender relations over the past 50 years – or, asClisby andHoldsworth (2016, 23)
note, the ‘extent to which women have pushed at the glass ceilings, jumped off the
sticky floors, and knocked down barriers to equality of opportunity’ – may suggest
that women have reached gender equality, patriarchal relations and power dynamics
continue to influence family life, paid work and social constructions of what it means
to be a gendered subject.

Theorisations of ageing as a socio-cultural (rather than a medical/biological) phe-
nomenon have lagged significantly behind critical engagement with gender (see Twigg
2010; Woodward 1999, 2006). Conceptualisations of age as ‘first’, ‘second’, ‘third’ or
‘fourth’ age recognise that age is a conceptual continuum across the lifecourse, and
these stages correlate directly not with the biological age of an individual but with
personal characteristics and capacities (Barnes 2011; Laslett 1989).The neo-liberal dis-
course counterposes successful ageing, with its emphasis on the third age as a social
imaginary of individual health underpinned by an active and socially engaged lifestyle,
to a fourth age of frailty (Gilleard and Higgs 2013). Before ‘successful ageing’ came to
prominence, with its focus on maintaining mid-life attributes, gerontological theory
offered alternative foci for later life based in reflection and self-confrontation with the
past that offer alternative visions for constructing identities in older age (Jones 2022;
Tornstam 2005).

Throughout people’s lives, age and gender, and other social markers of difference,
may take on differing degrees of significance when defining one’s identity and sense of
(in)equality in relation to others. While it is important to understand these changing
frames of comparison, research on the subjective construction of equality has lagged
behind other approaches to studying equality/inequality that seek to measure equal-
ity, understand objective causes and design social policy interventions (Bottero 2020;
Harris 2000, 2006). The rise of social constructionism in studies of social inequality
in the early 2000s precipitated greater interest in subjective equality, although there is
still a much greater understanding of changing patterns of inequality broadly, with a
weaker sense of how people perceive equality and how these perceptions are shaped
by everyday experiences and life events (Bottero 2020). Subjective constructions of
equality matter because while people may employ familiar sociological themes (such
as ‘power’ or ‘sexism’) to interpret and narrate events in their lives, they often employ
less familiar themes and draw upon changing everyday experiences and social contexts
to make sense of their situations (Harris 2006). Thus, by inquiring about what equality
means and enabling people to narrate their sense of equality, researchers can gain a
better understanding of equalities as they actually appear in men’s and women’s lived
experiences across the lifecourse (Ferraro 2009).

Feminist gerontology is grounded in feminist theory and critical gerontology; it is a
field focused on power relations and how intersecting oppressions shape people’s sense
of self (Calasanti 2009;Hooyman et al. 2002). Feminist gerontologists typically focus on
constructions of gender equality in later life (e.g. Calasanti 2009; Repetti and Calasanti
2017); however, this study asked women to reflect on their sense of equality across
their lives. This approach provides an opportunity for exploring shifting social roles

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Ageing & Society 3

and responsibilities by identifying key moments, transitions and events in a person’s
life (Dannefer 2003;Hooyman et al. 2002).The researchersweremotivated by the ques-
tion: How do older women make biographical sense of their equality in relation to others
over their lifecourse? This approach enables an understanding of how older women’s
constructions of equality change over time, and how intersectional gender relations
influence their constructions of equality.

This article draws on life history interviews (termed ‘herstories’ in the feminist tra-
dition) with 20 women aged 65+ years in Aotearoa New Zealand.1 These interviews
enabled the participants to provide reflexive accounts of how they view their lives ret-
rospectively and tomake sense of equality through a life narrative.The semi-structured
interviews evolved from a simple question: ‘What is life like for you as a woman over
the age of 65?’ Follow-up prompts included questioning how their current experiences
compared to their earlier years. At the end of each interview, the women were invited
to complete an equality ranking exercise, where they ranked (from 0 to 10) their sense
of equality over each decade of their lives. The study specifically refrained from defin-
ing what equality meant in this context to allow participants to make sense of equality
in their own terms. The findings revealed that participants’ constructions of equality
differed as they made sense of different phases of their lives: in childhood, age was
the predominant comparison by which people constructed their sense of equality with
others, whereas gender became dominant in adolescence, and remained so over the
20s–50s, becoming less prevalent in constructions of equality in older age. The rich-
ness of the interviews combined with a small quantitative data set enabled a detailed
analysis of how older women reflexively construct and make sense of equality within
different periods in their lives.

This paper makes three key research contributions. First, it adopts a broad con-
ception of subjective equality that focuses on cultural contexts of growing old, thus
contributing both to the concept of equality and to understanding women’s gendered
self-conception throughout their lives.

Second, it uses a novel retrospective herstory approach to understand subjective
equality. Feminist research has been instrumental in the development of alterna-
tive methodologies in gerontology that give voice to participants, but more work is
needed that brings together qualitative and quantitative approaches to life history in
ways that empower participants (Jones 2022; S ̈orlin et al. 2011). This methodology
supports participants’ agency in the research process and is helpful for feminist geron-
tology researchers who seek to enable participants to be empowered through their
research.

Finally, it examines these relationships in Aotearoa NZ, a country that has had less
attention in the scholarship on feminist gerontology. Aotearoa NZ is an interesting
case in part because it is often seen to have objectively high gender equality. In 1893,
it was the first self-governed nation to give women the right to vote in parliamentary
elections, and while women’s political representation remained low until the libera-
tion movements of the 1970s, women now make up almost half of elected members
of parliament. Gender equality in other life domains, however, has not been as pro-
gressive. Until 1960, it was legal for men and women to be paid different wages for
the same work. While pay discrimination on the basis of gender has been prohibited
in the public and private sectors since the 1970s, the gender pay gap (GPG) remains,

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4 Alice Beban et al.

rising during a woman’s working life to be worst in the 40s–50s age groups (Ministry
forWomen 2022).The cumulative wealth impact of the GPG is evident in inequality in
property ownership, with 17.4 per cent of properties owned by a sole female compared
with 19.2 per cent owned by a sole male (Owen 2021, 11). Women are also far more
likely to experience non-partner sexual violence and intimate partner violence than
men (Fanslow et al. 2022).

Aotearoa NZ is also one of the most ethnically diverse nations.2 The self-selected
participants in this study include people of European, Māori, Pacific and Asian ethnic-
ities. The participants are broadly middle-class, and thus their experiences of older age
also reflect relative class privilege of security in areas such as housing and food security
that does not reflect the experiences of all older women in Aotearoa NZ. However, the
group is heterogenous in ethnicity as well as disability and family formation, and their
life trajectories have been diverse and certainly not uniformly privileged. Thus, this
article does not make claims about how older women as a group construct inequality
over the lifecourse, and it does not claim that a sense of equality uniformly increases
in older age. Rather, the novel methodology sought to understand how women in later
life look back on life phases and the relevant contexts of those times.

The following section situates the study within a discussion of the gender and age
constructions of personhood over the lifecourse. A short profile of the participants and
methodology is then provided, before the results from the equality ranking exercise are
presented. These results are elaborated through the narratives women shared in their
life herstory interviews. This discussion follows a lifecourse analysis (childhood, ado-
lescence, early to mid-adulthood and older adulthood) and reveals how interviewees
construct and narrate equality as they reflect back upon their lives.

Gendered and aged constructions of personhood over the lifecourse
A major theme within ageing research is how inequalities associated with racial, class
and gendered identities affect individuals in their older years. Traditionally, lifecourse
literature on social inequality conceptualised equality as a categorical, distributional or
relational societal structure at a given time period, with cross-sectional measurement
of objective indicators seen as the means to capture this empirically (Falkingham et al.
2020).This work tends to see social positions as a stable destination (such as pay equity
or political representation). More recent work recognises the complexity of inequal-
ity, that is, the way people perceive equality changes over time, and that subjective
experiences differ; therefore, equality is not a stable destination but rather a moving,
complex construct (Kurzman et al. 2019). Subjective approaches, which focus on how
people experience and personally evaluate aspects of equality, elucidate the ways in
which constructs of equality may not match objective measurements (Kurzman et al.
2019). Researchers employing a lifecourse perspective use the concepts of ‘cumulative
advantage’ and ‘cumulative disadvantage’ to highlight how socio-economic inequal-
ities accumulate over the lifecourse (Dannefer 2003; O’Rand 1996). Other scholars
argue for an approach that looks at gender and generation simultaneously (McDaniel
2001). However, there is little research that seeks to understand people’s subjective
construction of themselves in relation to others across their lives through the lan-
guage of equality, although useful parallels can be made to research on the making

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Ageing & Society 5

of social identities, gender stereotyping, subjective satisfaction and wellbeing through
the lifecourse.

Identity can be understood as a process of ‘becoming’; people perform multiple
identities and these are often contradictory and shifting (Hockey and James 2003).
Conceiving identities as ‘multiple’ and ‘becoming’ highlights the interplay of struc-
ture and agency in the formation of identity. Thus, people negotiate their identities in
the context of the discursive possibilities of the present cultural and historical moment
(Parker 1992). What it means to be an older person is changing, shaped by shifts in
gender roles, paid and unpaid work and population structures. What it means to be a
person at any age is also changing, as identity is increasingly based on the individual
project of living ‘my life’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002). Discursive possibilities
provide the resources older people use to represent themselves as a certain sort of
person (Breheny and Stephens 2017).

One’s sense of self can be ambivalent and sometimes contradictory. In Anderson’s
(2019) interviews with women of different ages, for example, the body was a significant
feature of identity construction across the lifecourse, but people had ambivalent rela-
tionships with their bodies at different ages. Older women spoke about reaching ‘the
pinnacle’ of their life in their 20s; middle-aged women expressed a fear of the ageing
body; and some older people sawmenopause as a sign of no longer being a woman and
both desired to conform to cultural standards of youthful appearance and suggested
that the acceptance of being ‘a certain age’ brought a liberation from the tyranny of
appearance.

Other studies that focus on the intersection between age and gender in relation to
gender discrimination suggest that women experience different forms of sexism across
their lives and this shapes their sense of gendered equality (Granleese and Sayer 2006;
Harnois, 2015). For young women, gendered stereotypes of women and young work-
ers reinforce each other, with young women more likely than older women, or men
of any age, to be viewed as immature, weak or naïve in the workplace (Duncan and
Loretto 2004). Middle-aged women may be viewed as not fully committed to work,
particularly if they have children, whereas older women are often stereotyped as grand-
motherly and technologically incompetent, or are overlooked entirely (Rochon et al.
2021). Using general social survey data from the United States, Harnois (2015) finds
that women perceive high rates of gender and age-based mistreatment at work across
their working lives, with young women perceiving the highest rates of mistreatment
and a reduction among those in their 30s–40s, although remaining high in comparison
with men’s ratings for the duration of their careers.

While the exploration of subjective equality is less developed than objective mea-
sures, feminist researchers use qualitative interviews to explore women’s self-perceived
sense of relational equality. For example, Bui et al. (2012) explored subjective equality
in group interviews, choosing to not define equality or distinguish it from equity, but
rather letting participants determine its meaning for themselves. While research on
subjective equality through the lifecourse using retrospective interviews is less devel-
oped, there is a rich literature on subjective wellbeing through the lifecourse that has
useful parallels (Plagnol 2010). The notion of a U shape in happiness – that wellbeing
is highest for people in their 20s, decreases to its lowest point in mid-life and then rises
into old age – has been found in multiple studies of subjective wellbeing and is often

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6 Alice Beban et al.

cited as evidence for a mid-life crisis (Galambos et al. 2020). However, recent work
challenges the ‘U shape’, finding that this is culturally dependent and that, when asked
to reflect on their lives, older adults tend to recall mid-life as one of the more positive
periods (Galambos et al. 2020). Similar studies that ask participants to retrospectively
rank their wellbeing and life satisfaction across their lifespan have been undertaken
in Denmark (Mehlsen, Platz, & Fromholt, 2003), Switzerland (Freund and Ritte 2009)
and the US (Field 1997) with mixed results.

Gendered patterns of subjective self-esteem across the lifecourse also offer a useful
parallel to subjective equality because both are relational constructs. In ameta-analysis
on self-esteem across the lifecourse, Zuckerman et al. (2016), for example, found
no gender difference in self-esteem in childhood (under ten years), but differences
emerged in adolescence, with girls having lower self-esteem than boys, before differ-
ences levelled out by the mid-20s. The authors posit that self-esteem emerges from
a process of comparison that includes two key factors: what people think they can
become and who they compare themselves with (Hoyle and Sheril 2006 cited in
Zuckerman et al. 2016). In cultures where different genders share the same social
worlds in schooling and play, for instance, and where children are told they can do
anything no matter their gender, adolescence can bring a realisation that ‘it seems as
if women can reach goals that are as high as those of males, but in fact, they cannot’
(Zuckerman et al. 2016, 45). These authors argue that from their mid-20s onwards,
women may be settling into jobs and comparing themselves to other women (rather
than to men) or entering marriage and motherhood and finding merit in these roles.
In contexts where gender roles are fixed, there will be little gender difference in self-
esteem because women are unlikely to compare themselves to men, while in contexts
with less-rigid gender roles (such as where women are entering the labour market in
larger numbers but are still paid less), women’s self-esteem will be lower than that of
men. Thus, subjective constructions of self-esteem are not fixed; the mechanisms of
subjective constructions ‘are bound to change in the life span’ (Zuckerman et al. 2016,
46), dependent on the context-specific relational referents one compares oneself with.

Research on subjective perceptions of self-esteem and wellbeing has important par-
allels to research on subjective equality. It shows that subjective assessments vary not
only across age, gender and cultural dimensions but also in relation to life events (such
as work experiences, schooling and family formation). We also expect differences in
the ways people narrate subjective equality from these other concepts. While subjec-
tive wellbeing is closely linked to physical and mental health (with older people who
suffer health issues ranking lower in subjective wellbeing and life satisfaction) (Steptoe
et al. 2015), equality is a relational construct rather than an internal evaluation, and
therefore may be less closely linked to health or to specific life events. As a relational
construct, like self-esteem, it is important to understand not only the subjective equal-
ity ratings but the referent groups participants are comparing themselves to when they
rate their sense of equality, and the discourses they draw upon to make sense of their
lives.

Finally, it is important to recognise that people’s sense of equality is not simply
received from their social environment (i.e.what others do to them). Interactional per-
spectives of age and gender as achieved or relational constructs – that is, age and gender
as ‘doing’ – move beyond simple understandings of marginalisation as things that are

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Ageing & Society 7

done to one group by others.This framing demonstrates how inequalities are situation-
ally and interactionally accomplished rather than being natural categories (Butler 1990;
Krekula 2019). It also helps us to see how constructions of equality can change over
time. Understanding gender and age as ‘doing’ thereby creates space for individuals to
articulate how they respond to what they perceive as acts of discrimination towards
them. For example, older women may use beauty work to respond to gendered ageism
(Clarke and Griffin 2008) or they may turn to different images of womanhood, such
as embracing various positive gender identities like wife, girlfriend or mother, to reject
negative gender identities of old age as a time of decline (Krekula 2019;Wilińska 2016).

Methodology
This article draws on life story interviews with 20 women who fulfilled three criteria:
self-identifying as a woman, aged 65 years or older and interested in telling their story.3
The research team, made up of four cis-women feminist sociologists, aimed to provide
older women with the opportunity to ‘tell their story’ of (in)equality. The interviews
are termed ‘herstory’ interviews in the feminist tradition. Herstories are histories told
through a female perspective and/or feminist standpoint and have been part of feminist
methodological discourse and practice since the 1970s (Morgan 1970). As a research
method, they centre women’s narratives and everyday experiences, and seek to coun-
teract the predominance of male-dominated constructions of history (Hoff-Sommers
1995). As a biographical approach, herstories focus on women’s ‘search for meaning
and their attempt to make sense of their lives and identities’ (Wilkinson 2000, 438).
The life herstory interviews were loosely structured, evolving from a simple question:
‘What is life like for you as a woman over the age of 65?’ Follow-up prompts included
questioning how their current experiences compared to their earlier years. This pro-
vided participants an opportunity to share and reflect on what they perceived as the
important moments in their lives, from the retrospective standpoint of an older-aged
woman. Thus, the methodology moves from the person to the political in the classical
feminist tradition (Jones 2022), inviting participants to reflect on their own specific
experiences and to link these to wider issues and relationships.

At the end of each interview, a subjective equality ranking exercise was conducted.
The purpose of the ranking exercise was to help facilitate the story-telling process.
Participants were asked ‘How equal did you feel in each decade of your life?’, which
provided participants with an opportunity to narrate how they had experienced equal-
ity in different life periods. The exercise was presented as a table, divided horizontally
into decades and vertically into a scale of perceived equality (1 being least equal and
10 being most equal). A description or explanation of what equality meant in this con-
text was deliberately not offered, to allow participants to freely construct their own
understanding of equality as they reflected on their experiences. This better enabled
the research team to understand how participants constructed equality in their narra-
tives, particularly when reviewed in relation to the thematic analysis (Braun andClarke
2006) of the interview transcripts.

While no studies were located that have used a similar methodology to explore
women’s subjective conceptions of equality, this methodology is well developed in sub-
jective wellbeing (see Galambos et al. 2020) and has been used in S ̈orlin et al.’s (2011)

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8 Alice Beban et al.

study of subjective equality where they asked participants to rank their level of gen-
der equality through a likert scale. Sorlin et al. (2011) noted that the concept was
exceedingly difficult to capture, as respondents exhibited ambiguity as to whether they
experienced equality in their relationships. They argued for more exploration of how a
quantitative subjective ranking like they performed relates to qualitative explorations
of equality, and suggested that ‘elaboration on the basis of in-depth interviewswould be
of great importance. This would enable a deeper understanding of respondents’ ideas
and perceptions of gender equality in their lives’ (S ̈orlin et al. 2011, 10). Thus, this arti-
cle aims to combine rich qualitative analysis of subjective equality with a quantitative
subjective ranking to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which participants
constructed equality.

The interviews and ranking exercise were completed from June 2020 toMarch 2021,
and all but one took place in the participants’ homes. The interviews lasted one to
two hours, although extended time was often spent with the women – roaming their
garden, sharing tea and cake, and talking further about life, love, politics and future
possibilities. Purposive sampling of women in terms of indices of difference, such as
ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability and so on, was deliberately avoided; rather, partici-
pants were those who responded to recruitment posters that were distributed around
Auckland (AotearoaNZ’s largest city) orwhohad the details passed on to thembyother
women. Participants were aged between 65 and 88 years. Thus, this research does not
claim to represent the views of any specific identity categories other than that of older-
aged women. Income and wealth data were not collected as the research does not seek
to make a class analysis, but from the life herstories it can be assessed that the women
who chose to participate are broadly middle-class, based on a simple indicator: all the
women either currently owned or had owned their own home. However, while the
women all had been home-owners, they lived in diverse home environments (alone,
with a partner, with extended family, in the long-term family home or in a retirement
village). The interviews also revealed diversity among them, including varied experi-
ences of motherhood, marital status, employment, self-employment or homemaking,
cis- and transwomanhood, ethnicity, travel and migration (Table 1).

Results and discussion
Equality ranking exercise
Responses from the equality ranking exercise were analysed and collated into a box and
whisker plot graph (Figure 1). A box and whisker plot provides a visualisation of a data
set into quartiles. The box extends from the lower quartile to the upper quartile, with
themedian indicated by the line within each box.Thewhiskers indicatemaximum and
minimum values.

Looking at the results chronologically, childhood had the lowest median score of
4.5/10 and the widest spread in the interquartile range, indicating that rankings of
equality for childhood were most divergent among participants. Results converge for
the teenage years, coupled with a slight increase in the median (5.0/10). A third trend
emerges as women enter early adulthood. The median spikes upwards to 7.0/10, sug-
gesting that participants reported that their sense of equality increased in their 20s, and
it remains at that point until their 40s when there is a further upwards shift through

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Ageing & Society 9
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10 Alice Beban et al.

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Ageing & Society 11

Figure 1. Participant responses to the equality ranking exercise over the lifecourse.

the mid-adult years. The final trend occurs when participants are in their 70s, where
the median hits the highest ranking possible and remains there into their 80s.These
results suggest, from this small cohort of participants, that the participants perceived
their sense of equality to be greater in older adulthood than in their younger years.

In the following section, these trends in subjective equality are explained through
thematic analysis of the life herstories that accompanied the equality ranking exercise.
The discussion explores why there was a progressive upwards move in the equal-
ity rankings as participants reflected over their lifecourse and leaned on different
frameworks of comparison to make sense of equality in different life phases.

Shifting experiences and understandings of gender (in)equality over the
lifecourse
Differing understandings of equality in childhood
The childhood years had the lowest median ranking of inequality and also the great-
est spread. Considering this spread alongside the stories shared in the life herstories
also revealed the greatest diversity in the ways participants made sense of equality in
this phase of their life. For example, Guinevere and Filo were both born and raised in
the Pacific Islands before migrating to New Zealand as young adults, and they both
spoke about being treated as equals in familial practices and expectations in child-
hood. However, their rankings were at the extreme ends (10 and 1, respectively).When
Guinevere spoke about her childhood in Samoa, she reminisced: ‘I was equal and
so happy. I was so happy coming from that family of ten and we all do our things
together … In the evening we say our prayer before we would go to bed at night,
every night, and in the morning we do that before school … All happy, all happy.’ For

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12 Alice Beban et al.

Guinevere, the act of praying together as a family – parents and children together irre-
spective of age or gender – gave her a sense of familial bonding and equality within
the family unit. In contrast, when Filo reflected on her childhood growing up in Niue,
being treated equally to other familymemberswas an unhappy time: ‘It was not a happy
childhood for me.Well, growing up there, put it this way, childhood, there was no such
thing at all. There [was no], “Oh you’re a child, you have to play” … Just as soon as you
are able to contribute, yeah, get on with it. Get on with life.’ For Filo, being expected as
a child to have the same responsibilities as other (older) members of the family robbed
her of childhood freedom and what she now considers necessary for ‘children … to
establish their personality, to establish what they like’. In these narratives, both women
are constructing a sense of equality by the degree of utility (happiness) it gave them. In
Guinevere’s experience, being treated as equals was a source of great happiness, while
for Filo, equality in familial expectation prevented her from being free to be a child.
From this, it can be understood that equality is not always a desirable position but is
dependent on context and the dynamics between subjects.

Age relations rather than gender was the dominant construction of equality during
childhood. Several participants discussed the lack of autonomy they had as children
compared to the adults around them.Margaret, for example, ranked herself 1/10 (most
unequal) during her childhood years, explaining: ‘My life was dictated by my parents
and society. So I had no say really. I had to do as I was told.’ However, looking back at
this period in her life, she recognised, ‘Not that it was a bad thing at that time. It was
all done very lovingly from my perspective.’ Like Margaret, others similarly noted that
a lack of autonomy, when conditioned by love, was acceptable and not a ‘bad thing’ –
even if it did make them feel unequal and lacking in personal freedom.

While most participants constructed childhood equality through the veil of age
rather than gender, Rose took an explicitly gendered lens. She reflected on childhood
freedom and, like Filo, linked this to domestic responsibilities. Rose’s equality ranking
was in the 2nd quartile and she explained that in New Zealand in the 1930s and 40s
‘boys had far more freedom than girls … There’s no requirement for him to be home
until tea-time … whereas a girl was required to help out and very often help out with
little brothers and sisters.’ LikeMargaret, Rose didn’t necessarily talk about this inequal-
ity critically; rather, she took a reflexive stance, acknowledging that gendered norms of
the time meant that girls had more domestic responsibilities and fewer freedoms than
boys. Skye, who ranked herself a 10, also constructed childhood equality through a
gendered lens. She explained how ‘We’re at school. All kids together, boys and girls …
you don’t think that boys are better off than you.’ However, as discussed next, during
the adolescent years, school and peer socialisation became sites where gendered norms
associated with different expectations and opportunities came to the fore.

Teenage years: growing awareness of gendered inequality
In contrast to childhood where age was an important construct in how participants
made sense of equality, participants’ reflections on the teenage years (11–20) showed a
strong emphasis on gender as the defining construct for equality. Furthermore, rather
than a focus on the family, participants spoke about dynamics at school, recreational
opportunities, along with socialisation, sexuality and future employment.

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Ageing & Society 13

Miriam recounted how as boys and girls neared puberty, they were partially seg-
regated in the school playground. This irritated her – not because she necessarily
wanted to interact with the boys but because they had the ‘best part of the play-
ground and the girls weren’t allowed into the boy’s playground … That really annoyed
me.’ Miriam went on to attend an all-girls high school where she was ‘given the
mantra that girls can do anything and be whatever they want’. This affirmation of
female empowerment sat in stark contrast to her experience of social relations among
her male and female peers. She spent her teenage years in Sydney, Australia, and
explained:

When we went down to Bondi Beach, and thinking about how the boys behaved
down the beach … I didn’t feel all that empowered … [There was] just a sense that
the boys called the tune and the girls sort of had to sit round obediently while the
boys, let’s say, went on the surfboards and the girls had to sit and admire them …
The girls really weren’t very independent.

Here, Miriam reflects on how girls were expected to be docile and admiring, whereas
the teenage boys showed off their physicality and emerging manhood, and how these
dynamics left her feeling disempowered.

Elizabeth also spoke about gendered social dynamics and the attention that ado-
lescent boys were starting to give to the female body: ‘In my teens, I felt very unequal
because I mean, being five foot seven since I was twelve, and I was a really good ath-
lete, but I was also really skinny and there was, oh, so many put-downs from others,
well male students sort of thing. So I felt very unequal.’ Elizabeth’s quote speaks of a
growing awareness to changing bodies and how the teenage female body was a site of
the male gaze and gendered self-consciousness. Few participants spoke directly about
sexuality in their teenage years, although Beverley did remark that female sexuality was
an unspoken subject, ‘a word that you only read about in a book’.

During their teenage years, participants reflected on how they were indoctrinated
into what were considered gender-appropriate occupations, with unequal opportu-
nities based on gendered norms and expectations. For example, Skye dreamt of
becoming a zookeeper but explained how, as a teenager, she came to the realisation
that

When you’re in [high] school you haven’t got the opportunities that the boys
have got or the expectations … Women were not looked on an equal class as
men. I always loved animals … and when I was young I’d have liked to have been
a zookeeper. But there was no chance of that because that was, as withmany jobs,
a male-dominated area and they only employed males.

This realisation that there were occupations not available to women was an important
reason why Skye’s equality ranking dropped from 10 in childhood to 5 for her teenage
years. Similarly, other women spoke about gendered occupations and social expecta-
tions that meant their job choices were typically limited to nursing, teaching, typing or
office administration. Gender inequality followed thewomen into adulthood; however,
unlike the teenage years, they found ways to navigate and negotiate this.

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14 Alice Beban et al.

Early and mid-adulthood: navigating and negotiating gender inequality
Participants’ emphasis on gender as the dominant construct of inequality in the teenage
years flowed into their construct of early andmid-adulthood. New social roles, respon-
sibilities, relationships and freedoms did not dissipate the gender inequality they had
experienced as teenagers; rather, adulthood brought forth new forms of, and encoun-
ters with, gender inequality. Participants narrated experiences of sexual harassment in
the workplace, and of being told by employers, colleagues or men in their social circles
that they were less competent and should be paid less – whichmany of themwere.They
talked about gender-based violence, unequal care responsibilities and structures that
limited women’s autonomy. On this last point Margaret, who ‘can’t abide unfairness’,
explained:

You couldn’t open your own bank account until your husband gave you his per-
mission! … The same thing happened if you were in the hospital and needed an
operation. Your husband or father or other male relative had to sign the con-
sent forms. I remember feeling totally incensed by the unfairness of it all. I look
back now and think how far we have come in that time … Gender issues were so
unequal.

Mairi, who is 15 years older than Margaret, was also aware of gendered inequality.
Rather than being ‘incensed’ about this, she reflected on its normalcy at the time, but
also on how, looking back over her life, she had observed gradual change:

We were of the generation where it was taken for granted that the men were
in charge and did all of those sorts of things and told their wives what to do.
And we’ve just gradually changed. I suppose when the children were born and
we were looking after them, I think [my husband] was far more involved in that
than either of our fathers ever were … So it’s a gradual thing.

Despite ongoing experiences of gender inequality during early to mid-adulthood, over
these decades the median equality ranking of participants progressively increased.
They reflected on structural gender inequalities, such as stories of pay inequities and
work opportunities, as well as moments of ‘biographical disruption’: not being able to
conceive, losing children to suicide, and marriage breakdowns, for example. However,
without exception, the women constructed their experiences with a sense of their own
agency and inner strength.They told stories of asserting agency in their relationships as
mothers, spouses and workers, from standing up to a boss for higher pay, or demand-
ing that a partner did more of the unpaid domestic labour, to fighting off an attempted
rapist and leaving an abusive domestic relationship. Participants talked of ranking
themselves more equally as they took on new jobs, lived independently or travelled
internationally, which allowed some, such as Mairi, to ‘find out who I personally was’.
Even when faced with negative or distressing experiences, the participants chose to
focus on the agency that enabled them to navigate these moments. For example, Olivia
described an assault by a taxi driver in the Indonesian jungle, where he attempted to
beat and rape her, as a story of survival and spiritual enlightenment.

Beyond these transformational moments, many participants spoke of their agency
navigating equality in the labour market. They emphasised the respect they received

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Ageing & Society 15

from colleagues and the sense of empowerment they felt in their work lives. Nancy,
who trained in early childcare, became a headteacher in a kindergarten in just her
fourth year of teaching. Rose spoke about her teaching career as a space outside her
role as mother and wife where she found her ‘unique self ’ (and feminism). Mairi, also
a teacher, advanced up the professional ladder taking on important roles on school
boards and in the industry union where she advocated for workplace equality. By mid-
adulthood, Beverley, Elizabeth and Olivia had become self-employed in English for
speakers of other languages (ESOL) teaching, life coaching and nutrition, respectively.
These women ranked themselves higher in the equality exercise as they moved up
in their professions, and as they felt in control of their careers and appreciated the
challenges and rewards they presented.

Participants also talked about unpaid care labour as a further domain of gender
inequality. Many were ambivalent about this aspect of their lives in relation to equal-
ity; narrating the gendered load of care labour for children, husbands and elderly family
members, but also reflecting on the pride and sense of competency they felt with famil-
ial care work. Filo, who separated from her husband when their children were very
young, assumed the primary responsibility to care for and financially support them. As
a retired older adult, she spoke about her earlier ‘single mother, working woman self ’
with respect and gratitude. In this way, participants drew on a conception of equal-
ity as something achieved rather than passive – they recognised broader structural
changes that enabled (or constrained) equality, but also reframed difficult times and
relationships as more equal through emphasising the agency that they took to change
things.

Older adulthood: the age of a new ‘freedom’
Participants’ sense of equality in older adulthood was narrated as significantly higher
than at earlier life stages. Participants constructed equality in later life as feelings of
life satisfaction, self-fulfilment, happiness and, most notably, freedom: freedom in
knowing who they were and what they wanted to do, and freedom from gendered
responsibilities and inequality. Important for this sense of freedom for many partici-
pants was the financial security that they had built up through their working lives. Not
only did this give them the resources needed to travel and engage in leisure activities
but it also freed them fromconstant financial stress.Theywere also largely free from the
care responsibilities they had taken on in their earlier adult years: parents had passed
away, children had grown up and were making lives of their own and, if they were in
an intimate relationship, their retired husbands or partners were contributing more to
domestic responsibilities such as cooking meals. Guinevere was the only participant
who dropped her ranking in her 70s–80s. She had been forced to retire at age 75 from
a career as a community advocate that had formed a major part of her identity and was
required to sell her car and move in with her children in a different city, leaving behind
the life she had built over the previous decades.

For some women, this sense of freedom was related to the move from paid work
to retirement. The official retirement age in New Zealand is 65 years and at this age,
irrespective of whether an individual chooses to continue to work or not, retirees
are entitled to a government pension as well as the ‘Supergold Card’, which, when

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16 Alice Beban et al.

presented to stores or service providers, offers discounts. Margaret said that receiving
her Supergold Card was a pivotal moment:

I guess all my life I’ve felt a great weight of responsibility … and duty, and I’ve
always been the person that … picks up the pieces, is the peacemaker, brings
people together, sorts out the problems, fixes the chaos. And it’s exhausting! I feel
like the moment I got my gold card, it was like, whoo-hoo! I’m free! [laughter] It
was an extraordinary moment.

Margaret described the freedom that came from handing over responsibilities to the
next generation: ‘I feel free, unfettered. There’s another generation or two below me
now, I’m not the person that’s responsible for everything.’

For Filo, retirement was also a turning point from responsibility to freedom in her
life. She explained:

When I retired from work, Hallelujah! Happy. Freedom! Freedom! … I am the
age I am and I don’t have any hang-ups … I control my destiny. You know, I do
what I want to do, go visit my children overseas, hang around with my beautiful
grandchildren here in New Zealand … My own time is my leisure time … My life
today, blossoming!

Margaret’s and Filo’s sense of equality is not only about freedom from responsibilities
and from paid and unpaid labour; it is also an internalised freedom and contentment
to be oneself. Rose’s adult life was filled with care responsibilities, yet she similarly felt
that older adulthood allowed her to ‘make your own choices, be your ownperson’, while
Mary, after all the ‘bad stuff [of] three relationships and two marriages’ was in the past,
finally found ‘the freedom of being by myself and actually finding me’.

Discussion
In a recent meta-review of sociology research on ageing, Anne Barrett (2022, 215)
argues that research on age as a system of inequality remains ‘peculiarly lacking’. She
calls for more research on age-based inequalities and how these intersect with other
social structures to privilege some groups over others. This article contributes to rec-
tifying this gap, with a focus on understanding older women’s subjective measures
of inequality through a feminist gerontology lens, thus making a contribution both
to the concept of equality and to understanding women’s gendered self-conception
throughout their lives.

This study’s retrospective narrative approach furthers scholarship in feminist geron-
tology, which typically focuses on constructions of gender equality in later life (e.g.
Calasanti 2009; Repetti andCalasanti 2017).This study askedwomen to reflect on their
sense of equality across their lives, building on the feminist gerontology literature that
incorporates a lifecourse approach and identifies key moments, transitions and events
in a person’s life (Dannefer 2003). By explicitly asking participants to discuss their sense
of equality at different points in their lives, different kinds of events andmoments come
to the fore. Indeed, while lifecourse studies often focus on large life events – school-
ing, marriage, motherhood, major illnesses and so on – participants’ narratives in this

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Ageing & Society 17

study are distinctive for what they focused on as well as what they did not, in ways that
suggest important insights for lifecourse literature. While the biographical disruptions
of large life events did feature, participants also narrated their shifting sense of subjec-
tive equality through reference to small ways they asserted themselves in the face of
oppressive structures, and small moments such as an encounter on a beach or read-
ing a book that transformed their outlook. This suggests, in the tradition of feminist
research, that the everyday is just as important as large life events for making sense of
life narratives.

The findings also contribute to the growing literature on subjective equality. This
study shows that equality is a complex, shifting construct that takes on changing frames
of comparison throughout people’s lives, thus taking forward the literature on subjec-
tive equality, which has lagged behind objective measures of inequality (Bottero 2020).
The study found that participants ranked themselves ‘more equal’ with others later in
their lives, in ways that both conformed to and challenged the discourse of ‘success-
ful ageing’. Across the participants, there was a significant rise in subjective equality
from childhood to older age, with more varied responses in childhood and a con-
vergence of responses from adolescence onwards. When participants narrated their
sense of equality at different ages, they drew upon the discourses available to them to
retrospectively make sense of their experiences. Participants’ construction of equality
shifted as they narrated different life stages, with age taking on more salience in child-
hood and older age, and gender equality narrated as central to conceptions of equality
in mid-life. Participants’ narratives of childhood drew on common cultural discourses
of childhood as a disempowered social group compared to the adults around them
(Hockey and James, 2003). When reflecting on childhood, a gendered sense-making
framework was less salient for participants in contrast to age. Many participants said
that they experienced life primarily as children rather than as ‘girls’ in the ways they
were treated at school and in the home; this for some brought freedom and a sense of
being the same as the boys around them, while others compared themselves with the
adults around them and focused on the lack of autonomy they had as children.

This parallels the ways participants constructed a sense of equality in older age.
Silver (2003, 387) notes that ‘in the third and fourth ages … [g]ender categorization
becomes less salient than age as a way to self-define’, as women are more likely to be
degendered by language and perception. Similarly, many participants’ construction of
equality at older age drew less on gender and instead focused on freedom through the
falling away of various gendered identities – being a parent and carer, an employee
or business owner, or through body image or anxiety over social relationships and so
forth. Thus, both childhood and older age were times when the responsibilities and
obligations associated with performing the multiple roles of womanhood were less
visible.

This connection between childhood and older age identity formation is recognised
in work on social identities across the lifecourse, where the paradoxical similarities
between children and older adults can be understood because of their ‘dual marginal-
isation from the mainstream of adult life’, seen through the innocence of children and
the frailty of older age (Hockey and James, 2003: 14). What this study shows, how-
ever, is that while constructions of equality in both childhood and older age were
framed through the prism of freedom from gendered social identities, the rankings for

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18 Alice Beban et al.

older age were significantly higher across participants, largely because they understood
themselves to have agency in the act of freeing themselves from gendered constraints.
The ranking exercise itself was thereby an opportunity for participants to assert that
they are equal and they refuse to be anything else. If the ‘I’ that participants con-
structed through these exercises is considered to be particular versions of who they
think they are or who they would like to become (Giddens 1991), the participants
constructed an identity as older women that reclaimed the invisibility of being older
women (in relation to the previous burdens and expectations of gender) as a freedom
from social constraints. This didn’t mean they thought of themselves as less femi-
nine, however; they simultaneously constructed identities of lovers, grandmothers and
friends, through their stories about love and dating, the agency they asserted in their
relationships with partners, and their social relationships with other women as well as
with family.

This assertion of agency in participants’ responses can be understood as a counter-
narrative to the frailty of older age, and an embracing of the ‘third age’ discourses of
‘successful’ and healthy ageing (Belgrave and Sayed, 2013). These concepts attribute
agency to ageing individualswhereby individuals in their third age are called to age suc-
cessfully by remaining youthful, healthy, productive and self-reliant (Laliberte Rudman
2012, 11). What is interesting, however, is that the participants were not ideal ‘success-
ful ageing’ subjects, as they were experiencing various challenges, including health and
mobility issues, the prospect of moving from their own homes to assisted living com-
plexes, death of or separation from spouses, and financial constraints. However, they
affirmed through their ranking and herstory interviews that they had never felt more
equal.

The rankings and narrative construction the participants deployed to explain the
intervening years of adulthood help to understand the very high ranking that they
ascribed to their older adult years. Across participants, the teenage years were often
described as the first timewhen they understood themselves as constrained due to their
gender; that is, equality here was conceptualised through participants’ relationships
with social structures that they considered to offer different opportunities and barriers
for them as women when compared with the young men around them. Crucially, the
women talked about these realisations as roadblocks because they felt that, as young
women, they could donothing about it.This parallels the research on self-esteemacross
the lifecourse, which found that women compared themselves with men from adoles-
cence, with the realisation that the stories they were told that ‘girls can do anything’ and
be equal with men were not true due to structural barriers (Zuckerman et al. 2016).

In contrast to this lack of agency the women described during their teenage years,
they ascribed higher perceptions of equality from their 20s to their 50s. This was
primarily conceived in relation to their own enactments of equality: moments when
they asserted agency over what they recognised as unequal relationships in the home
and workplace. Alongside these personal narratives, interviewees also recognised
the changing social and political currents that enabled new opportunities for both
women and men, and new understandings of what it means to age. All the participants
noted that, in many ways, things had changed for the better for women. Importantly,
however, the moments participants drew upon to explain their changing perceptions
of equality were primarily demonstrated through the assertion of agency. This came

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Ageing & Society 19

from a growing awareness of difference, and the cumulative effects of challenges and
frustrations they experienced as women which enabled them to feel that they could
speak (or act) out.

In this way, participants constructed equality as something that is relationally
enacted; that is, through their rankings and narratives, they viewed themselves as
agents of equality. Thus, it is important to recognise that high rankings for some
participants did notmean that they felt fully equal, with no gendered constraints or dis-
crimination. Rather, as they explained in their interviews, they gave themselves higher
rankingswhen they saw themselves pushing against the gendered constraints theywere
subject to, often in gradual ways, as they enacted more agency in their various rela-
tionships. This assertion of equality can be seen as one way participants reconciled
the contradiction of experiencing structurally unequal relationships and encounters
throughout their lives and at times feeling powerless or complicit; in their construction
of themselves as active women making a difference, the implicit referent comparison
is to other women (or other versions of themselves) who did not act.

The freedom and the agency the women speak of also have an affective dimension;
they relate not only to the reduction in labour burden (or labour obligation) but to the
release from social expectations. The women’s discussions of freedom to be themselves
can be read not only in terms of caring for others but also in terms of their release
from a need to conform to particular social expectations (Earhart 2019). The women’s
narratives provide a counterpoint to the narratives of bodily decline and ‘looking back’
to better youthful days found in some research on gendered ageing (Anderson 2019).
When women constructed themselves in relation to others through the discussion of
equality in our study, the body (in decline/decay) did not often enter their narratives,
and even when it did (for example with participants experiencingmobility challenges),
it was not the dominant theme in interviews. Rather, they spoke of no longer caring as
much about what others thought, and of having the choice to do what they wanted free
from the judgement of others. This is instructive for researchers working on subjective
assessments, including not only subjective equality but also self-esteem and wellbeing,
which similarly involve comparisons with others. While this study supports the asser-
tion that people make subjective assessments based on their referent relationships (i.e.
who they compare themselves with at different points of their lives) (Zuckerman et al.
2016), it also shows that the strength of those reference relationships matters, and that
through their narratives the older women constructed old age as a time when they
consciously rejected comparing themselves to others. To explain this conception of
equality in older age, it is necessary to go beyond psychological understandings that
inform much of the work in this area to recognise the sociological discourses that
participants deploy to construct their identities through their narratives.

It is important to recognise that this study involved self-selected participants who
can predominantly be described asmiddle-class.Thus, class differences thatmay shape
more divergent rankings of subjective equality are not seen. Literature in feminist
gerontology recognises that changing conceptions of old age can play into fears of old
age decline and accentuate class differences in people’s sense of equality (Calasanti
2009; Mansvelt et al. 2014). Neo-liberal public discourses of ‘successful ageing’ put
responsibility on the individual to have ‘productive hobbies’ and maintain physical
and financial health in ways that make any deviation from this a failure, so constraints

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20 Alice Beban et al.

on financial and social resources and health make the ‘freedom’ of older age and the
ability to enact a ‘healthy ageing’ identity something that depends on class position-
ing (Calasanti 2009). The participants generally embraced the healthy ageing/third age
identity of pursuing learning, relationships and new experiences, and the majority of
them had the resources to do this.

The participants’ sense of agency and inner strength, evident in their narratives, is
not surprising given that neo-liberal subjectivity expects people to talk about their lives
in ways that position them as active agents. However, the narratives can also be seen
to depart from neo-liberal subjectivities of individuals choosing their own life paths.
In many of their stories, participants were well aware of the structural forces shaping
their lives. They focused on how they navigated structures, with the interviews giving
them the opportunity to reframe difficult pasts.This can be seen as moving beyond the
neo-liberal conception of ‘successful ageing’, to focus on evaluation and reflection.This
suggests the possibility of ‘gerotranscendence’ (Tornstam 2005), that is, seeing older
age as a time in which people shift their definition of reality from a materialistic and
rational view to a more cosmic one, with an embrace of playfulness, a lessening of
obsession with the body, and self-confrontation with both good and bad aspects of
the past. This point is similar to that of Jones (2022), who found that older women in
her study spoke around gerotranscendence in their reflections on reconciliation and
finally having ‘responsibility for myself ’ as opposed to responsibilities of parenthood
and work. Expressions of both neo-liberal ageing discourses and gerotranscendence
can be seen in the participants’ narratives of high levels of equality in older age. When
participants expressed care and gratitude for their younger self who struggled as a sin-
gle parent, or reframed violent rape as a spiritual experience, they used their narratives
to reconcile their current and younger selves, creating what Erikson (1959) termed
ego integrity through accepting the life they have lived. The findings thus concur with
Miller (2019), who notes that it is important not simply to ascribe participants’ narra-
tives to confirming to the discourse of successful ageing but also to recognise how they
show a freedom from the feelings of/narration of the burdens of work and care, and a
genuine ease in one’s body and self, that is in part a reframing of the self, and a reck-
oning with ‘what I have been and where I have come from’ (Miller 2019, 390). In this
way, the research points to the importance of embracing complexity in older people’s
narratives of ageing, opposing dominating notions of old age as purely a matter of loss,
frailty and decline, or of narrow conceptions of successful ageing, without completely
denying such aspects of later life (Barrett 2022).

Conclusion
Reflecting on the insights from this methodological approach suggests directions
for future research. The retrospective herstory approach to understanding subjective
equality is a novel contribution to methodologies in ageing research. While meth-
ods similar to the equality ranking exercise have been used in research on subjective
wellbeing (Galambos et al. 2020), life satisfaction (Freund and Ritte 2009) and gen-
der equality (S ̈orlin et al. 2011), the herstory approach in this study departs from
these methods in the interpretation of the data and the construction of the broader
research project as an explicitly feminist undertaking. Life herstory interviews provide

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Ageing & Society 21

reflexive accounts of how people view their lives retrospectively, rather than providing
an objective assessment of the levels of inequality people have experienced. The data
give information on how women make sense of equality through a life narrative. The
ranking exercise only made sense as a method embedded within the larger narrative
interview, providing a focal point for discussion. The process of assigning and narrat-
ing equality rankings gave some participants the opportunity to reframe traumatic or
difficult experiences, retelling these in ways that brought out their own agency, even in
small ways. This process helped foster self-compassion for their younger selves. Thus,
this methodology does not give an objective view of people’s sense of equality over
their lives; the results cannot be directly compared with the results of scholars who
interviewed people from across a range of ages to make claims about older women as
a group being more equal, or of women now facing less inequality than in previous
decades. Rather, the significance of the rankings is in the ways the women constructed
equality differently as they reflected upon the courses of their lives.

Despite recent literature highlighting the importance of subjective inequality,
including as a significant predictor of wellbeing (Weiss and Kunzmann 2020), sub-
jective measures of inequality, status and wellbeing used in ageing research continue
to be vaguely defined. A meta-analysis of research on subjective inequalities in later
life found that terms are often used interchangeably, and there is a gap in research
focusing explicitly on subjective inequality (Scharf and Shaw 2017). Indeed, in fem-
inist gerontology, the construction of age and gender beyond chronology and biology
is well established, but it is curious that this same treatment has not extended to con-
cepts of equality. Thus, methodologies such as the approach used in this article that
combine ranking and narrative interviews could enablemore precise, contextually rich
conceptual understandings. A similar methodology might be useful for concepts such
as subjective wellbeing, self-esteem or happiness – other measures that involve a sub-
jective comparative assessment. Often, it is assumed that the meanings people give to
equality are static, but, as demonstrated in this article, equality is not a static construct
but one that evolves based on individuals’ life experiences and the socio-cultural dis-
courses available to them. Furthermore, participants’ narratives revealed that equality
is not always seen to be a desirable position; this is dependent on relationships between
subjects, and participants noted that a lack of autonomy, conditioned by love, was
acceptable, even if it made them feel unequal. Future research could further develop
this feminist intersectional analysis of inequalities, in line with a feminist lifecourse
approach and critical feminist gerontology, that does not treat structures or categories
of analysis as static and predefined, but interrogates how these are enacted in dynamic
ways.

Finally, this study suggests future research directions for critical gerontology litera-
ture that seeks to understand complexity amongmultiple ageing experiences, including
those of people from different nationalities and ethnicities. As Chazan (2020) notes,
this may open possibilities of liveable and positive futures among those who do not
identifywith dominant images of ageing.This study examined olderwomen’s construc-
tions of equality in Aotearoa NZ, a multicultural country that offers valuable insights
into how cultural contexts influence constructions of equality. The small group of par-
ticipants included Indigenous Māori and several migrant New Zealanders who were
born in the Pacific Islands or Asia, and migrated to New Zealand as adults. The study

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22 Alice Beban et al.

found that somemigrant women conceptualised equality with reference to growing up
in contexts in which girls and boys were all expected to contribute to the family and
community, in different ways from participants born in Aotearoa NZ. Future research
with migrant diasporic communities could further examine how the cultural contexts
of youth matter in the ways that the older women make sense of their life narratives
and their construction of equality.

Competing interests. The authors declare none.

Ethical standards. Ethical approval was granted from the Massey University Human Ethics Committee.

Notes
1. Throughout the article, the term ‘Aotearoa New Zealand’ (shortened to ‘Aotearoa NZ’) is used. Aotearoa is
the contemporary Māori-language (Indigenous) name for New Zealand, and the article uses both the Māori
and the English names to denote respect for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations.
2. There are more than 200 ethnicities, the main groups being 70 per cent Pākehā (European ancestry), 16.5
per cent Indigenous Māori, 15 per cent Asian and 8 per cent Pacific ethnicities (Stats 2020).
3. Prior to commencement of recruitment and data collection, this research project underwent an in-house
ethics peer-review. It was deemed to be low risk and was subsequently not required to undergo a full ethics
approval. Considerable efforts were taken to ensure theminimisation of potential harmby regularly checking
in on the comfortability of our participants, ensuring that they could pause or withdraw their engagement at
any time, and completing the interviews at a time and space determined by them. Regular teammeetings and
reflections were also held to ensure the wellbeing of all team members, and the interviewing team member
in particular.

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Cite this article: Beban A, Walters V, Ashley N and Cain T (2024) Older women’s constructions of equality
over the lifecourse. Ageing and Society, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X2400045X

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X2400045X Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353500010004003
https://https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353500010004003
https://https://doi.org/10.1353/nwsa.2006.0023
https://https://doi.org/10.1353/nwsa.2006.0023
https://https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2016.07.007
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X2400045X
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X2400045X

	Older women's constructions of equality over the lifecourse
	Introduction
	Gendered and aged constructions of personhood over the lifecourse
	Methodology
	Results and discussion
	Equality ranking exercise

	Shifting experiences and understandings of gender (in)equality over the lifecourse
	Differing understandings of equality in childhood
	Teenage years: growing awareness of gendered inequality
	Early and mid-adulthood: navigating and negotiating gender inequality
	Older adulthood: the age of a new `freedom'

	Discussion
	Conclusion
	Notes
	References