You risk a ragged retirement if you’re counting on these numbers

Retirement advice is made to be tailored to our needs and the times. People often sit down to figure out how much they will need and assume they’ll spend 40 years in the workforce, from age 25 to age 65, more or less. That’s an outmoded assumption from the days when defined-benefit pension plans roamed the earth, said Diane Garnick, TIAA’s chief income strategist.

“We don’t have that labor market anymore,” she said. “It couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

Related: 7 reasons women face greater retirement challenges than men

Women in particular need to look out. These rules of thumb are often inadequate to the reality of their shorter careers and longer lives. Women who are widowed are twice as likely to be living in poverty as their male counterparts, according to the National Institute on Retirement Security.

Some advice from a new paper by Garnick: 

Go easy when predicting your time in the workforce

Men, on average, spend 38 years in the workforce, and women 29, Social Security data show. So “if women aren’t quite saving the $18,000 tax-deferred maximum in a 401(k) and are thinking they’ll take time off in the next few years, they should try to start contributing the max before they leave,” Garnick said. “They’ll only be able to save up to $5,500 in an IRA when they’re out of the workforce.”

Neither men’s nor women’s employment lives meets the 40-year span that has been considered a full career. That said, the percentage of women working full-time in their late sixties is up, according to new research. 

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Factor in the professional gender gap

Women earn 78 cents to a man’s dollar, according to U.S. Census Bureau data, but for women in the professional services category, it’s 72 cents.