The Gender Implications of Pension Reforms. General Remarks and Evidence from Selected Countries

Globally, women make up the majority of older people, as well as the majority of the elderly living in poverty. Despite these facts, and despite international and national commitments to gender mainstreaming in all policy fields, concerns about gender equality have been largely absent from mainstream pension policy debates, and from mainstream academic research on pension reforms. This paper argues that current pension reform trends in many countries have weakened women's pension protection. To a great extent this is because of the way in which pensions are calculated on the basis on people's level of experience and number of years working, These calculations fail to take into account thefact that, because of continued gender inequalities in the labour market better-paid, men are more likely to benefit from better paid, higher status jobs, while , women are more likely to interrupt their working lives to bring up children.. Added to this, the male breadwinner model is still a dominant social policy stereotype in Western welfare states, with the assumption that women are secondary earners and need less income both as direct pay and pensions. The paper also discusses selected country examples which illustrate the gender dimensions of pension reforms, and the impacts of particular design features. It considers the consequences of various pension scenarios - for example, if the retirement age for women was raised, as is the case in some Western European countries, there could be potential impacts on families who are reliant on the contribution of grandmothers in providing childcare.