Women need to open their eyes to a reality that is not spoken about enough: the gender pension gap.
As women become mothers, many are not realising that, when they opt to reduce their working hours or take on certain family-friendly measures, they are unknowingly placing themselves at a financial disadvantage.
What looks like an attractive decision that allows for better family-work balance can have negative repercussions in the future.
Why? Because slowing down on work means getting a lesser pension entitlement.
While this might not be an issue for some women in healthy relationships – and when private pensions or other retirement plans are in place – it could place others on the poverty line.
The rate of marital breakdown has increased over the years. Data also shows that women outlive men. In both scenarios that separate a woman from her partner – marital breakdown or death – the woman is likely to be worse off financially due to the pension gap if she slowed down on her career.
This point emerged clearly during the first Women’s and Gender Studies Symposium and Conference.
Prof. JosAnn Cutajar, from the University of Malta’s Department of Gender and Sexualities at the Faculty for Social Well-being, did not mince her words as she unravelled the realities of gender and pensions.
She highlighted research that showed that the average duration of the paid working life for women was 33 years compared to 41 years for men.
In order to get a full retirement pension, a person born after 1969 must have a yearly average of 50 social contributions paid over a period of 41 years.
Gaps in contributory history result in a lower pension on retirement.
This is why, Cutajar explained, when one looked at the reality on the ground, there was a big gender disparity in pensions in Malta.
The reason for this is that, after the first child, women experience a 60% drop in earnings as they reduce hours or opt for part-time work, choose jobs in lesser-paid feminised sectors or change jobs and accept family-friendly measures.
These choices are putting women at a disadvantage but no one is telling women this, she said.
The census of 2021 showed that over half (50.4%) of the female population aged 16 and above were either married or in a civil union. The number of mothers totalled 139,223, constituting 64.2% of the female population. Widowed people were predominantly females, comprising 7.7% compared to 2.4% among males.
Meanwhile, a 2019 report carried out by the National Commission for the Promotion of Equality showed 30.5% of Maltese women were considered at risk of poverty compared with 27.4% of men.
The report notes that “the major factor behind this discrepancy is the high rate of elderly females with no or little pensions, who would rely on the husband’s sole pension”.
What is worrying is that this is not a thing of the past. Today’s women of child-bearing age are making uninformed choices that could impact their future.
Yes, children deserve their parents to be present, when possible. But this need not be the mother alone.
Educating men and women to both take on present roles at home is the only way to level the family-work scales for both men and women. In the absence of that, reviewing the pension system to factor in the value of the work carried out by women at home could be a start.