Dr Kristina Ambrazevičiūtė, a researcher at the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, has published an article entitled “Reconciling work, care and ageing: labour law structuring older women’s employment in Lithuania and Latvia” in the international academic journal “Community, Work & Family”.

In this publication, K. Ambrazevičiūtė seeks to assess the role of labour law in the context of population ageing, particularly in enabling older women to remain in paid employment. The study focuses on two countries – Lithuania and Latvia – and examines three key areas: employment flexibility, workplace and job task adjustments, and protection against discrimination.

In both countries, employment flexibility is the main means of enabling older women to reconcile work with changing health conditions and care responsibilities. However, this opportunity is largely based on the right to request changes to working conditions, with the final decision left to the employer’s discretion. In both countries, workplace and job task adjustments are generally made only when health problems arise or work capacity declines, rather than being used as a preventive measure to preserve professional capabilities. Although discrimination on the grounds of age and sex is prohibited at all stages of employment in both Lithuania and Latvia, the legal framework focuses primarily on individual grounds of discrimination and the resolution of individual disputes. As a result, discrimination arising from the intersection of age, sex and care responsibilities often remains legally unrecognised.

The researcher concludes that current labour law primarily enables individual adaptation but does not sufficiently function as a collective instrument for addressing the challenges of population ageing and gender inequality. Consequently, responsibility for reconciling work, care responsibilities and well-being is largely shifted onto women themselves.

The article is available here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13668803.2026.2749799

The article was written as part of the project “(Not)prolonging the working life of older women: legal environment, guarantees and intentions (VAM)”, implemented by the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences and funded by the Research Council of Lithuania. For more information about the project, see https://teise.org/en/projektai/vam/