Economics and Public Policy Pension Reform and Women by Rachel Kaprielian Just as today's working women continue to fight for fairness in wages and opportunities, many older women are struggling against gender inequity in retirement. Half of all women collecting Social Security rely on it for at least 90 percent of their income, compared with 29 percent of men. Although the laws governing retirement are gender-neutral on paper, today's retirement policies and plans fail to reflect the work patterns and demographics of American women.
Women typically live longer than men and thus have a longer retirement to fund.
Widows collect approximately half of what their husbands would have collected. The picture is especially bleak for divorced women because most states provide a woman no automatic legal right to half of the pension her husband earned during the marriage. Too often, a woman going through a divorce fails to fight for her share of her husband's pension, which is typically a couple's second largest asset after their home. Because women workers still earn only seventy-four cents to every dollar earned by men, they typically accrue less in Social Security and other pension benefits based on earnings. In addition, women accrue lower retirement benefits because they change jobs more frequently than their male counterparts, roughly once every four years.