Women and Retirement

Paper Summary:

Recent reports highlight how the gender gap in wages affects women's retirement as well. According to a report from the Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement (WISER), older women are twice as likely as men to be poor after retiring. Compared to their male counterparts, older women have to make do with less Social Security benefits, fewer and smaller pensions and less individual savings. This paper examines the growing fiscal health problem many women face upon retirement. Instead of having a nest egg to live upon, many women face the real possibility of poverty, even after retiring from a lifetime of hard work.
The first part of the paper presents a general picture of the fiscal resources available to and problems faced by women upon their retirement. In addition to this general picture, the paper pays special attention to the problems faced by minorities like Hispanic and African-American women. The next part of the paper looks at the factors behind these problems, such as divorce, widowhood and women's care- giving duties. The main factor behind many women's inability to save for retirement, however, remains the gender gap that continues to plague much of the working world. The third part of the paper thus explores the effects of gender on the pay scales of men and women across disparate fields, from academia to management to blue-collar operations. It also looks at how these unequal pay scales continue, despite legislation that mandates equity in pay. The fourth part of the paper examines the link between the gender gap in wages to the phenomenon of women's poverty upon retirement. It shows how pay inequity means that women work more, earn less and as a result, often have less money for their retirement. Finally, the paper looks at the steps women can take to address these issues and prepare for their retirement.

From the Paper:

"In a study of wage differentials across the service professions, Margaret Gibelman found that the median salary for both sexes is higher in service occupations that are predominantly male, such as construction and surveying. Conversely, the mean wages for both sexes is significantly lower in occupations where women comprise more than 75 percent of the workforce, such as nursing and receptionists (Gibelman). Gibelman's study implies that women suffer from two forms of discrimination in the service and sales industries. First is discrimination on an individual level, where women get paid less than their male counterparts for the same work. Second, there is a marked discrimination against occupations that have a large female employee base and could therefore be labeled as "women's occupations." It is difficult to make comparisons between occupations like cashiers, 90 percent of whom are women, and janitors, 70 percent of whom are men. However, the fact remains that even male-dominated professions that utilize unskilled labor generally still command higher median incomes."

More papers on Women and Retirement:

• Argumentative Essay # 97354 : "Social Security Retirement"
• Analytical Essay # 132190 : "Retirement Pensions: An Analysis of the CPP"
• Essay # 61233 : "Women in Corporate Professions"

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