Gender and socioeconomic inequalities in health and wellbeing across age in France and Switzerland

There is increasing evidence that wellbeing is unequally distributed across sociodemographic groups in contemporary societies. However, less is known about the divergence across social groups of trajectories of wellbeing across age groups. This issue is of great relevance in contexts characterised by changing population structures and growing imbalances across and within generations, and in which ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to have a happy and healthy life course is a primary welfare goal. In this study, we investigate wellbeing trends in France and Switzerland across age, gender, and socioeconomic status groups. We use two household surveys (the Sant´e et Itin´eraires Professionnels and the Swiss Household Panel) to compare the unfolding inequalities in health and wellbeing across age groups in two rich countries. We view wellbeing as multidimensional, following the literature highlighting the importance of considering dierent dimensions and measures of wellbeing. Thus, we investigate a number of outcomes, including dierent measures of physical and mental health, as well as of relational wellbeing, using a linear regression model and a linear probability model. Our findings show interesting country and dimension-specific heterogeneities in the development of health and wellbeing over age. While our results indicate that there are gender and educational inequalities in both Switzerland and France, and that gender inequalities in mental health accumulate with age in both countries, we also find that educational inequalities in health and wellbeing remain rather stable across age groups.