on Mar 14th, 2006Women, Pensions, and Raising Children
No doubt about it, raising a child requires the most precious commodity of all: time. One reward of nurturing a healthy child is the prospect of being visited by grandchildren on a festive holiday.
How many years a woman spends out of the workforce, though, can have a huge impact on her pension. The lost wages contribute nothing toward her retirement except goodwill. So it’s interesting to note that the British government has set its sights on augmenting this situation through weekly credits.
The government will today unveil radical plans to end discrimination in the provision of women’s pensions by proposing weekly credits for women whose careers are interrupted because they acted as carers or raised children.
Only 30% of women reaching full basic state pension age are currently entitled to a full basic state pension. On average women aged 60 receive 70% of a full basic state pension. There are thought to be 2.2m women not accruing the full basic state pension, of which around 600,000 are earning below the lower earnings threshold of £82 a week.
Move to give women carers fair pension deal
Patrick Wintour
The Guardian, Tuesday March 14, 2006
Women, Work, and Pensions: International Issues and Prospects
by Jay Ginn
Population aging has fuelled interest in pensions and intergenerational equity, leading to privatization of pensions. Yet the gender implications of such policies and the connections between the gender contract and the generational contract remain unexplored.
Women, Work and Pensions examines how women’s paid and unpaid work, interacting with the gendered pension systems of six liberal welfare states - Britain, the US, Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand - contributes to female poverty in later life. By comparing how these welfare states deal with women’s employment, family roles and pension entitlement, the nature of the residual welfare model is better understood.
Changes over the past three decades in the gender contract and in women’s employment suggest that family caring may have less impact on women’s pensions in the future. Yet pension reforms which diminish the effectiveness of women-friendly features in state pensions through cuts and privatization point in the opposite direction. This issue, and how the pension penalties of caring vary with women’s class, ethnicity and birth cohort, are major themes of the book.