Gender inequality in occupational pensions: Is there a marriage penalty?

• In Event: Aging and the Life Course Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 11: Employment, Job Quality, and Retirement

Abstract

Over their working lives, women typically accumulate fewer economic resources than men because they often allocate fewer hours to paid work and have intermittent work patterns due to their caregiving roles and gendered household division of labor. These lifelong differences in paid labor may result in fewer women having access to occupational pensions, and women accumulating lower pension benefits than do men upon retirement. Focusing on gender differences in access to occupational pensions and their accumulation, this study investigates differences by marital status in Israel, pointing to the way the long-term economic effects of marriage intersect with gender. This study combines Israeli census and administrative data to create a longitudinal study spanning twenty years (1995-2015). The sample is composed of men (N=23878) and women (N=20555) who reached retirement age in 2015, and were in the labor force during in the 1995 census. The study focuses on the Jewish population because female labor force participation rates were low among Palestinian women during this period.
The findings reveal an interesting pattern of gender inequality: Although a slightly higher percentage of working women have access to occupational pensions than men, their pension income is substantially lower, with the gender gap similar in all ever-married categories and smaller among never-married. Divorced and single men have lower pension income than married men, whereas never-married women have the highest income compared to all ever-married women. These findings point to a marriage penalty in occupational pension income among women, and a marriage premium among men.

Authors

• Alisa C. Lewin, University of Haifa

• Haya Stier

• Noa Achouche, University of Haifa