The DAISIE project explores the gendered impacts of policies and practices aimed at extendingworking life (EWL) in five contrasting national settings (the Czech Republic, Ireland, Sweden,Switzerland and the UK), using a mixed methods research design inspired by insights from life-course and gender studies. The project addresses two significant and timely issues: labourmarket participation in later life and the influence of labour market and family trajectories onthe experiences of older workers in different national and occupational contexts. This reportexplores the issue of extending working life in the Swedish context. It begins by discussing theSwedish gender equality politics, which follows by a presentation of the pension system, pensiontrends and obstacles against an extended working life. The processes towards an extendedworking life illustrates the difficulties in implementing gender equality in practice. In the Swedishdebate on raised retirement age, older women’s and men’s equal opportunity to work into oldage is not identified as a core issue, although this is an essential goal of the general genderequality policy in Sweden. Nor has the gender segregated labour market been emphasised toany great extent, despite being at the heart of gender inequalities in terms of wages, pensionsand sick leave and parental leave. It is further shown that the argument for an extended workinglife is mainly based on demographic statistics and economic arguments about the sustainabilityof the Swedish welfare and pension systems, while organisational factors, such as ageism andage norms in work organisations have not highlighted as a real obstacle to older people’sparticipation in working life. Finally, it is argued that the Swedish gender equality project alsohas to include the older age groups and that the question of extended working life is an exampleof contemporary gender equality issues.