The proportion of workers with access to private pensions has grown in many countries. Women benefit greatly from the redistribution of income that is a feature of many public social insurance schemes. There are many types of redistributive mechanisms. In the US, the Social Security benefit formula is weighted so that low earners among whom women predominate receive a benefit that is a greater proportion of their preretirement earnings than that received by high earners.
Women typically live longer than men.
Therefore, the result of using gender-neutral mortality tables is a redistribution from men to women. Privatized Social Security systems, which cannot efficiently redistribute or target benefits, are designed to promote individual well-being, rather than the common good. Thus, women, because of discontinuous work careers and lower earnings, often reach retirement age with inadequate pension benefits. Without the redistribution resulting from Social Security, they are often forced to turn to means-tested public assistance programs, with all the negatives that implies. Another provision of particular importance to women is pension indexing for inflation and rising living standards.