October 2024

Labor Market Gender Gaps in Türkiye: A Bird’s Eye View

By Silvia Domit & Damla Kesimal Despite recent improvements, Türkiye’s low female labor force participation and high share of informal female workers stand out internationally. Closing these gender gaps would boost medium-term growth and make it more inclusive. This paper puts these gaps in an international context, explores their interlinkages with fiscal policies, and identifies policy priorities. Source SSRN

September 2024

UK. More than half of women expect to run out of money during retirement, as gender pensions gap persists – Fidelity International

More than half (52%) of women in the UK do not believe they will have enough money to sustain their income in retirement, according to findings from Fidelity International’s annual Women and Money study.1 The research indicates that a significant number of women have adjusted their financial plans in response to economic pressures over the past 12 months. Specifically, more than one in ten (12%) women have reduced their pension contributions – with those who have done so cutting back by an average of...

August 2024

UK. Britain should raise pension contributions to plug ‘gender gap’, consultant Mercer says

 The minimum amount that workers and employers in Britain put into pension pots should be raised to help plug a retirement cash gap between men and women, and boost investment in productive assets, pensions consultant Mercer said on Wednesday. Britain's new Labour government has announced a review of the pensions industry to give people more value and create bigger cash piles to invest in infrastructure and green technology to raise returns and economic growth. The government should consider increasing - in stages - the minimum...

July 2024

Retirement Decisions in the Age of Covid-19 are Older Employees in Digital Occupations Working Longer?

By Giovanni Gallo & Amparo Nagore This paper investigates the retirement response to the pandemic and to the resulting acceleration in the adoption of new technologies. Using the European Union Statistics of Income and Living Conditions datasets and making use of the natural experiment of many workers being forced to work from home in Europe during the lockdown, we compare the retirement response of older workers in digital occupations (i.e. more exposed to digital technology) versus non-digital occupations to detect...

Career Expectations and Outcomes: Evidence (on Gender Gaps) from the Economics Job Market

By Brooke Helppie McFall, Eric D. Parolin & Basit Zafar This paper investigates gender gaps in long-term career expectations and outcomes of PhD candidates in economics. For this purpose, we match rich survey data on PhD candidates (from the 2008-2010 job market cohorts) to public data on job histories and publication records through 2022. We document four novel empirical facts: (1) there is a robust gender gap in career expectations, with females about 10 percentage points less likely to ex-ante expect to get...

May 2024

Esade report: Moving from awareness to action in gender lens investing

The Esade Center for Social Impact (ECSI) has published its Gender Strategies in Investing study to better understand how European investors can move from awareness to action in gender lens investing (GLI) by striking a more equitable balance in their own teams as well as by applying a gender lens to their portfolio investments. The study, which was launched at a webinar hosted by two of its co-authors, Leonora Buckland, senior researcher at ECSI and Lisa Hehenberger, associate professor at Esade Business...

Female Labor Supply and Rural Pension Eligibility in Brazil

By Gaurav Khanna, Margaret Lay, Stephanie Lee & Benjamin Thompson In 1991, Brazil expanded its rural old-age pension to cover millions of previously uncovered women, conditional on work requirements.  We use a difference-in-differences approach to show that this expansion drastically increased women’s employment by nine percentage points, or 26 percent.  This increase in labor force participation occurred among women who were immediately age-eligible, and among younger cohorts that would be eligible in the future. These results illuminate the capacity of...

April 2024

UK. Women’s pension pots ‘worth half of mens’

The comparison with male pensions find women’s savings are dwarfed, with men’s pensions average around £75,000. It was also found that men are ‘more likely to manage their own pensions’ than women. Independent research conducted on behalf of Handelsbanken Wealth & Asset Management on gender and the wealth gap. Nearly a third of women were found to have pensions below £25,000 and only one in 10 women have a pension exceeding £100,000, whole this is true for nearly a third...

Wealth Creators or Inheritors? Unpacking the Gender Wealth Gap from Bottom to Top and Young to Old

By Eva Sierminska, Charlotte Bartels & Carsten Schroeder There is growing interest in understanding how gender influences the accumulation of wealth. While prior studies have focused on labor-related determinants, our research focuses on inheritances and gifts. Using unique data that over samples the top 1% of wealth holders in Germany, we show that the gender wealth gap is small for individuals up to age 40, then widens, and declines for those past retirement age. Transfer amounts and their timing are...

March 2024

UK Government ‘continuing to drag its feet’ on women’s pensions

The UK Government has been accused of “continuing to drag its feet” on ensuring women born in the 1950s receive pension equality. Thirty campaigners from the Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi) group were in the public gallery as the issue was raised in the Senedd on March 6. The campaign was launched amid concerns about the way in which women’s state pension age was increased from 60 to 66 in line with men. Millions of women saw their retirement plans plunged...