Beyond Work–Life Balance: Multilevel Strategies Across the Life Course of Older Women Who Remain in Work in Chile

ABSTRACT Research on work–life balance and extended working lives largely assumes institutional supports that make reconciliation feasible. Drawing on 46 retrospective life‐story interviews with economically active older women in Chile, we challenge this assumption by showing that conciliation under institutional scarcity is not a stable “balance,” but a cumulative, reserve‐dependent configuration process shaped by thresholds of depletion and replenishment across the life course. We theorize three mechanisms through which women sustain employment beyond statutory retirement age: sequencing (temporally ordering exits, reductions, and reentry), layering (stacking paid work with caregiving, health management, and learning), and resource conversion (transforming one resource into another, e.g., income into care time or microtimes into skills). These mechanisms operate across institutional arrangements, relational configurations, and individual/embodied practices, producing patterned cycles of withdrawal and reentry, kin‐based redistribution of care, and bodily regulation that converts constraints into functional capacity. By specifying how conciliation is assembled under scarcity and when it fails as reserves cross thresholds, this study advances a mechanism‐based framework for analyzing gendered extended working lives in Global South contexts.