Unequal Ageing in Europe

While much is known about the situation in the labour market in the form of gender pay and earnings gaps, rather little is understood about their sequel in old age-the gender pension gap. Entering the world of pensions may well signal a step backwards as far as women's independence is concerned, particularly in countries where women have earned economic independence in employment and are now being confronted by institutional frameworks presuming, encouraging or even imposing dependence. Unequal Aging in Europe explores the gender pension gap across the 27 member states of the European Union, plus Iceland and Norway. Employing microdata from the Survey of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), along with data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), the authors derive key facts regarding pension inequality between women and men. An intuitive indicator for a pension gender gap is derived and contrasted with equivalent and far more widely used indicators for pay and earnings gaps. They explore European diversity in a number of dimensions, such as age, marital status, level of education, and labour market experience. Finally, these findings are benchmarked across equivalent findings in the US, and the authors examine how far the findings conform to taxonomies of welfare regimes, paying due care to the gender dimension. The editors and contributors draw policy lessons, both regarding the importance of incorporating a gender dimension in planning and tracking pension reform, to prove the necessity of adopting corrective measures for those generations of older people in European countries who are 'caught in the middle.'