Malta registered the second-highest gender pension gap in the EU in 2018, with men receiving almost double the amount in their pensions than women, according to Eurostat.
Maltese females received 42% less than males and while the gap got marginally smaller by almost 1% compared to 2017, it has widened steadily since 2013 – at which point it stood at 27%.
According to Mark Musu, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry for Social Solidarity, the increase is a result of measures taken to help women, especially those born between 1952 and 1961, to earn a small pension as opposed to earning nothing.
Among these measures were fiscal and other incentives to re-enter the Labour market.
“These measures enabled women with insufficient contributory records to at least reach the minimum contributory requirement and earn a small pension, instead of nothing,” said Dr Musa.
However, seeing as only women receiving retirement income are taken into account in the statistics, an increase in women receiving a small retirement income would reduce the average per capita pension of women and thereby widen the gap, he pointed out.
According to gender equality expert Anna Borg, generally speaking, the gender pension gap is the sum of cumulative inequalities women face over the course of life.
One of the biggest contributors to the pension gap is motherhood and empirical research shows a strong correlation between the number of children and the gender pension gap, she said.
“As mothers struggle to reconcile paid work with unpaid work in the family, they are more likely to lower their work intensity and opt to work part-time or to reduce their working hours.
“This not only reduces their income but also lowers their chances of being promoted.”
Another contributor to the gender pension gap is the gender pay gap, she added.
“Overall, women’s wages are generally lower than those of men and there are fewer women in senior management roles.”
Since pension entitlements are calculated on earnings, the lower remuneration and missed opportunities for better pay in top positions also contribute to the pension gap, she explained.
In addition to that, mothers also have more gaps in their employment history due to career breaks around the birth of their children.
The result is that they tend to have a lower average number of years at work and accumulate fewer savings when compared to men, she pointed out.
While the government has been providing short time credits of between two to four years per child (depending on the date of birth of the parent) to cover some of the gaps in National Insurance contributions due to employment breaks to rear children, the widening gap in pensions shows these are not enough, she added.
“In their complexity, all these factors are leading to the gender pension gap and the feminisation of poverty,” Dr Borg told Times of Malta.
“The pension system is largely designed around masculine norms and reflects the inequalities that women still face because they shoulder more family responsibilities and face bigger direct and indirect discrimination both at work and in society at large.”
Within the EU in 2018, the biggest pension gap was observed in Luxembourg, where women aged over 65 received 43% less pension than men.
The Netherlands recorded the third biggest gap (40%), followed by Austria (39%), Cyprus (38 per cent) and Germany (37%).
The smallest differences in pension income between the sexes were registered in Estonia (1%), Denmark (7%) and Slovakia (8%).
In the EU as a whole in 2018, women aged over 65 received a pension that was on average 30% lower than that of men.
However, the data shows that, over time, the gender pension gap within the EU has been shrinking and is now four percentage points less than 2010 (34%).