Productivity among older adults manifests in engagement in paid work, voluntary work, giving support to others, home maintenance and housekeeping. This paper reports an investigation into the extent to which levels of participation in the different productive activity types in The Netherlands are associated with age, gender and the settings in which older people live. The regional and urban–rural dimensions of variation are examined. The data were derived from the European Study of Adult Well-Being survey (ESAW). The results show that the oldest women tended to restrict their productivity to the private domain of housekeeping, while the oldest men were more often productive in the community, and that regional variations were stronger for women than for men. Traditional gender roles particularly affected the way in which older women living in a peripheral region participated in productive activities. In contrast, the urban–rural dimension was more important for men than for women, partly because a group of older men in the cities were not involved in paid work. Overall, strong gender influences on the variations in productive engagement were found. Processes of age-related contraction and convergence in patterns of participation in productive activities were imputed from the cross-sectional data. A full understanding of the ageing and cohort effects underlying the reported patterns would require much more detailed information on the spatial and temporal dimensions of older people's activity patterns.