Work and family policies are critical in maintaining women's attachment to the workforce and hence their lifetime earnings and retirement income. If the ageing labour force scenario is plausible then one way to address the problems of growing dependency rates and labour shortages would be to develop policies that facilitated continued increase in female labour force participation areas, which will mean not only increase participation rates on an average for women, but increase labour force attachment over the life course for women and longer hours of employment for women.