Women and Retirement Pensions: A Research Review

Abstract

The links between women's caring work and access to economic resources are particularly critical in the context of widespread public policy debates about retirement and pensions, many of which neglect care as a key issue for analysis. However, among feminist economists it is widely recognized that women's patterns of care provision have adverse implications for their access to economic resources in later life. The feminist economics literature examines many of the interactions between women's caring roles and their access to resources, particularly women's capacity to access economic resources through publicly mandated or regulated pension schemes. This article reviews research that places women's patterns of work and care at the center of analyses of retirement pension policy in an effort to provide a summary of research on gender and pensions policy and to contrast the extent to which differing institutional and policy frameworks accommodate women's caring roles.

Keywords:

• Savings
• pensions
• retirement policy

Acknowledgments

Earlier drafts of this article benefited from thoughtful comments and suggestions from Siobhan Austen, Alison Preston, Diana Strassmann, and three anonymous reviewers from Feminist Economics. I gratefully acknowledge their contributions and thank them for their input into the production of this article.

Notes

¹ A large number of working papers can also be accessed via research institute and university web pages. Some examples include the University of Michigan Retirement Research Center; the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe; and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing.

² The other three OECD countries with pension fund assets worth more than 50 percent of GDP in 2003 are Switzerland (125 percent), Iceland (102 percent), and the Netherlands (94.1 percent); (OECD 2005: 2).

³ From 1 July 2009, same-sex couples are included in the definition of couples for the purposes of all social security payments (including the age pension) made by the Australian Commonwealth Government.

⁴ These estimates are based on January 2007 individual rates for Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement quoted in Human Resources and Social Development Canada (2007) compared with 2007 wage and salary information from Statistics Canada (2009).

⁵ This situation seems to result from both the relatively large number of US researchers working on this issue and the existence of several large databases that facilitate the analysis of work, life events, and retirement. Relevant data sets include: the Asset and Health Dynamics Among the Oldest Old Study (Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan 2009a); the Health and Retirement Survey (Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan 2009a); the Newly Entitled Beneficiary Survey (Social Security Online 2009); the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2009); and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan 2009b).

⁶ Richard V. Burkhauser, J. S. Butler, and Karen C. Holden 1991; Logue 1991; Stanley De Viney and Jennifer Crew Solomon 1995; Marsha A. Goetting, M. Volora Raiser, Peter Martin, Leonard W. Poon, and Mary Ann Johnson 1995; Marilyn Moon and F. Thomas Juster 1995; Holden and Kuo 1996; Lois B. Shaw and Hsiaoye Yi 1997; Purvi Sevak, David R. Weir, and Robert J. Willis 2003–4.

⁷ I am indebted to an Associate Editor of Feminist Economics for this point.

⁸ In the first case, City of Los Angeles, Department of Water and Power, v. Marie Manhart (1978) the court ruled that pension funds could not require different levels of contributions from men and women in order to pay them the same benefits on retirement. In the second case, Arizona Governing Committee for Tax Deferred Annuity and Deferred Compensation Plans v. Nathalie Norris (1983), it was ruled illegal to pay different levels of benefit to men and women who paid the same level of contributions.