I woke up this morning and the realisation hit me that I may have accidentally retired, at the ripe old age of 46.

It seems the combination of age, gender and living in a regional area delivers a triple whammy of despair when it comes to employment.

Last year I wrapped up a contract position and decided  to take some time-out to work on some personal projects.

After a short break from the workforce, I was reinvigorated and keen for a new (paying) challenge. Unfortunately the options were limited and the interest in hiring a woman in her 40’s was lukewarm.

It seems I’m not alone with this problem, over at The Conversation today Eviction from the Middle Class: how tenuous jobs penalise woman outlines just how easy it is for woman to slip into poverty as they get older.

After 40, due to a combination of age discrimination and scarcity of full-time, permanent jobs, they found it very difficult to find an equivalent-level job despite good education and skilled employment histories.

Woman’s work trajectory is disjointed, we take time out to have children, we adapt our working life to accommodate those children and we are willing to trade-off income for flexibility which seriously impacts on our financial security.

I spent 10 years at home, raising children and running a small-scale home-based  business. When I returned to full-time employment I ended up working for three years for a large organisation on a casual basis, no sick leave, no holiday pay (yes technically they pay you a little more to compensate for the lack of leave but frankly when you crunch the numbers you lose out).

Lisa Lintern wrote a great piece in response to the Prime Minister’s comments this week that “women have it pretty good”.

• Why do I have to keep knocking back exciting jobs because I’m terrified I can’t balance the demands of being a mother with the demands of a top corporate position?

• Why do I keep accepting ‘easier’ jobs…jobs that I did about 10 years ago?

• Why is it likely that a man will be paid 17 per cent more than me for doing that easier job?

• Why is the balance of my super much less than my husband’s?

Tracy Spicer at Daily Life wrote a piece on the amount of “unpaid” work asked of women.

We need to stop giving it away for free. You know what I’m talking about: Unpaid work, pro bono projects, and endless internships.

Women already work 62 days a year for free, because of the 17.1 per cent gender pay gap. So why are we expected to put up our hands for more of these so-called “opportunities”?

A combination of self-sacrifice, and structural discrimination, leads to men being paid bonuses twice as big as women’s.  This creates a perfect storm, in which we are condemned to a rocky retirement. The MLC Retirement Report reveals women end up with 40 per cent less superannuation than men.

There is no doubt my work history includes volunteer work, teacher-aid work (despite actually having a teaching degree), part-time work, contract work and jobs with a 3.00pm finish so I could get to school pick-up. Hell, even this blog is a unpaid vehicle of creativity.

It was a combination of choice and circumstance which saw me take less than I was worth because in the daily juggle that is modern family life I needed to maintain a balance of – get some bills paid – raise the children – try to keep some semblance of sanity.

The result was a giant jigsaw of work history an “eclectic” mix accompanied with loads of life experience. None of which fits neatly into the job criteria so popular in the human resources sector.

Those choices turned me into a living statistic.

My super balance stands at a massive $62,000 while my husband with his unbroken work history has accrued $200,000. Given that I may have slipped into early retirement I will be destitute before I’m even old enough to access the pittance that it is.

My earnings over the past 17 years are less than half what my husband has made in that time.

Now as my children are older and there is light at the end of the long caring tunnel I find myself with more time available to dedicate to work, yet it appears I have passed my use-by date, oh the irony!

We see examples of high-flying women who have worked and raised children simultaneously but I’m struggling to find some role-models of women who took time out and, when the time was right, reinvented themselves into a successful, financially rewarding careers. Does anyone know of any?

In the meantime I’ll take my statistically representative self off to try to figure out how the hell I can earn an income without an employer.

PS This Spicer piece at The Hoopla has more of the sad statistics also.