This means that the gender pension gap was £136,800 last year, which is down from £145,700 in 2020 but up from £105,500 in 2019.
Now Pensions said that on average a woman would need to work an additional 18 years in full-time employment to save the same amount into their pension as the typical man.
Has the average woman actually worked 18 years less than that average man over working life?
Given maternity leaves, part time working, falling out of the workforce perhaps – well, maybe. I#d not want to insist that it’s true. But it is an interesting way of looking at it, isn’t it. Perhaps the average working man has put 18 more years of work into his pension?
Probably not 18 years more but then compounding and time invested will mean that more years need to be worked later to make up for any missed ones early on….
Let’s run the numbers for women with children vs women without children. Motherhood gap will be larger than the gender gap.
For extra fun, break down the mothers by number of children. Maternity gaps alone mean that the mothers with more children will have earned less than those with fewer children.
Not just years, but hours worked will be lower for females. More part-time work, more 9-5 versus on-call, etc.
When this BS first popped up in the States the fems made it sound like men & women doing the exact same work were earning significantly different $. The report they cited compared men & women who worked “full time”, which meant 35+ hours per week. The women included averaged 39 hours/week. the men averaged 43. And the men were much more likely to be jobs with unpredictable hours, riskier work, outdoors, etc.
It was always a mistake paying women pensions. Throwing them on the street when they no longer perform a useful function was always preferable. Now look where a little kindness has got you.
or, they could work in the public sector!
Women live longer and often retire earlier (for many of the same reasons they don’t work as many hours and often in jobs that pay less).
The same amount of money has to go further as a result.
The reason why men have larger pensions is that they work more hours perweek, more weeks per year and more years than women – and most cases work harder and/or in more dangerous jobs than women, with a side-effect that their compulsory savings tpwards pensions are greater. There is a monor addition from the tendency of men with discretion over pension payments to save more than comparable women (especially into tax-efficient pension schemes).
Women’s greater longevity is, at worst, secondary to the above as nearly all defined benefit schemes subsidise females by giving them equal annuities per £ saved despite their expectation of reveingmore instalments of the annuity. This latter isn’t quiteas bad as the Attlee scheme which gave them equal annuities from age 60 as the men got from age 65 despite the women contributing for fewer years.