THE NEW AGE

Choosing to work in your seventies and beyond

I’ve still got the energy to keep working and the work I do isn’t terribly physical, so while I’m able to manage it, I’ll keep going. Dame Margaret Sparrow (left)

Dame Margaret Sparrow’s Wellington home is filled with stuff. Bookcase after over-flowing bookcase. Yellowing maps. A handstitched quilt, draped across a leather sofa almost as old as its owner. Outside, there’s a cracked concrete path and a garden pretty much left to its own devices.

But Sparrow, a pioneer of women’s sexual health in New Zealand, is too busy to tame the hillside section she’s owned since 1969. The 82-year-old may have hung up her stethoscope a decade ago, but she still works at a pace that would surprise many younger workers.

There is, for example, Ishtar, the not-for-profit company she and a group of fellow doctors started in 1999 to import the controversial abortion pill RU-486 when no other pharmaceutical company would touch it.

Sparrow is still an active director of the company named after the goddess of love, fertility and war, although the days of manually packing pills to send to hospital pharmacies are over. “We recently employed a distribution company to handle that side of things, as it wasn’t a good use of our time,” she says.

The rest of her week is taken up with writing books, mainly about New Zealand’s turbulent abortion history. The first was published in 2010, the second in 2014 and a third has recently gone to the printers. Voluntary work for the Intersex Trust Aotearoa NZ, which she’s done for 20 years, helps to fill in the gaps.

Surely the former president of the Abortion Law Reform Association has earned the right to put up her feet?

“Why would I? I’m fortunate that I’m in a position where I don’t have to work for the money but because I enjoy it,” says Sparrow, who usually lives alone but is currently sharing her house with two of her three 20-something granddaughters.

“I’ve still got the energy to keep working and the work I do isn’t terribly physical, so while I’m able to manage it, I’ll keep going.”

Sparrow has always worked — from the Taranaki dairy farm where she was born to the three medical jobs she juggled for many years: at Victoria University’s Student Health Service, a sexual health clinic and Wellington’s Family Planning Clinic (which now bears her name).

She also raised two children alone after her marriage to Peter, another doctor, ended in 1964.

“No one else I knew back then was a single mother or had a failed marriage, but I just got on with it.”

She had to grow an extra layer of skin after her work as one of New Zealand’s first abortion doctors earned her abuse — from having white crosses planted on her lawn to her neighbours being warned about the “murderer” next door.

“It has been a struggle at times but I’ve enjoyed standing up for what I believe in and seeing change happen.”

Sparrow, who was made an MBE in 1987 and a Dame in 2002, says there was never any pressure on her to retire when she turned 65.

“In fact, it was quite the reverse. They said to me ‘How are we going to replace you?’ There was never a sense of ‘you need to move on, you’re taking a younger doctor’s place’. I’m sure I could have stayed longer but I wanted to focus on other things.”

Sparrow recently attended a reunion with the 20 or so of her Otago Medical School classmates still around. “Sadly, some of my fellow students are no longer able to work because of heart problems, Parkinson’s, deafness or blindness. I’m fortunate that I’ve still got my health and, as long as that continues and I can keep making a difference, I’ll keep working. There are still things I want to achieve ... ”

Sparrow isn’t alone. Census figures show that 40 per cent of 65 to 69-year-olds and 21 per cent of of 70 to 74-year-olds remained in full or parttime employment in 2013. This is a major increase on the previous 2006 Census figures but, even before the jump, New Zealanders had one of the highest employment rates of 65-plus-year-olds in the OECD, beaten only by Iceland, South Korea and Japan.

Almost two decades after the compulsory retirement age was banned by the Human Rights Act, Dr Susan St John, the Director of Auckland University’s Retirement Policy and Research Centre, says today’s 65+ demographic can be divided into three groups.

“The first group is likely to keep working if they can through necessity, because NZ Superannuation is not enough for most people to live on, especially in the big cities,” says Dr St John.

“The middle group keeps working for a range of reasons, including feeling they still have more to contribute and because they enjoy work, while the third group comprises those who keep working in full-time, well-paid work. These people tend to be the highly skilled, non-manual, professional class. They may have better health than their peers and enjoy what they do, plus they’ve very much bought into society’s strong work ethic, which encourages people to derive their sense of worth from paid employment. For this group, the idea of getting their gold watch and playing golf all day is neither attractive nor realistic.”

What’s more, as we grapple with the hike in the retirement age to 67, it’s worth considering research from the United States that shows once people retire, almost 85 per cent say they’d like to return to work.

“While still employed, people tend not to appreciate the benefits of working until that work is no longer there and they have a vast amount of life and leisure,” says Ursula Staudinger, a psychologist and ageing researcher from Columbia University.

“But if all your whole life is a vacation, then that vacation can lose its value.”