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发表于 2017-12-26 13:03
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Among those retired in the EU, women on average receive 39% less in pension income—from state and workplace pensions—than men do (see chart). This puts women at greater risk of old-age poverty. The European Institute for Gender Equality, a think-tank, warned in a study in 2015 that it also makes them more likely to stay with abusive partners. Reforms to European pensions, tying benefits even closer to individual contributions and thus income, mean the gap may widen further.
The schism is primarily a reflection of the labour market. Women on average work fewer hours than men, in less well-paid jobs, for fewer years. So of course their workplace pensions are smaller. But retirement is more costly for women. In Europe they retire on average earlier than men and live five years longer. Longer lives are not a problem if the state or a company has promised to pay a fixed income until death. In the EU, annuities are not allowed to discriminate on gender grounds and so are a better deal for women than men. But women also have longer periods of illness and are twice as likely to live alone in old age. And they tend to be more cautious than men, often preferring cash or fixed-income investments. Mercer, a consultancy, found that women are 67% more likely than men to invest in a defensive fund with a lower expected level of growth. So women without a fixed pension tend to be worse off.
In Germany the gap is far more pronounced in the west than in the east, where more women work, partly a hangover of the communist past. Then women worked almost as much as men and pensions were tied to years worked, not income. That helps explain the small pension gaps among the retired in former Soviet countries. Such historical legacies must be kept in mind when projecting what the gaps might be in the future, says Ole Beier, from the OECD, a think-tank.
A few recent developments, however, may aggravate the problem, notably a steady shift from public to private pensions. This is vital if state pensions are to be affordable as societies age. But unless women earn and save more, the gap will widen. And after years of progress in many countries, the pay differential between men and women has stopped narrowing.
Prescriptions for narrowing the gap in workforce pay are well-known. Access to affordable child care, paid parental leave and flexible working all help. Abolishing lower retirement ages for women, as is happening in most OECD countries, will also help. But even so, for the immediate future women are likely to continue to have different career trajectories from men’s, with more breaks—for raising children and caring for the elderly—and fewer promotions. Diane Garnick, from TIAA, a financial-services firm, says that many women think that so long as they put the (default) recommended share of their pay into a savings pot they are on track, even if in absolute terms the number is too low.
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