Pension reform is a major issue that concerns everyone. However, it has tended to concentrate on the looming government financial crisis, transitional justice and inequalities between workers in different jobs. Unfortunately, little attention has been paid to gender inequality in the pension system.
Some have even questioned why it is necessary to have representatives from women’s organizations in the Presidential Office’s National Pension Reform Committee.
Hopefully, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) can fulfill her campaign pledge to pay special attention to the pension rights of older women and single mothers.
That was why the Awakening Foundation accepted the government’s invitation to take part in the committee and urged the government to include the gender issue in its pension reform agenda. Income maintenance is certainly a major function of the pension system, but the basic financial safety net — which is what the system was created for in the first place — should not be forgotten.
Gender issues must be included to make it clearer which groups are excluded from the social safety net and face poverty in old age.
When Taiwan’s 13 pension schemes are examined with the aid of gender statistics, two problems immediately appear.
First, the purpose of the pension system is to prevent poverty, but because the majority of those insured are homemakers, handicapped, students or unemployed — who are less capable of paying insurance — and their old-age pension plan pays less — giving insufficient incentive for people to pay into it — only about 45 percent of people actually do pay for it. How can it insure the basic living standard of older people?
Which groups of people are most likely to suffer from this situation?
According to a 2013 government report on the living conditions of elderly people, 26.9 percent of men aged 65 or older relied on pensions, compensation or insurance as their major source of income, compared with only 9.6 percent of women, but 44.6 percent of women in this demographic depended on the support of their children or grandchildren.
Clearly, elderly women rely heavily on the support of their families.
This creates a further complication. With increasing divorce rates and the percentage of people choosing to remain single increasing annually, families are less likely to be the main source of support for elderly people.
What about the responsibility of society and the government? Is the defective pension system really able to ensure the financial safety of elderly people, be they women, single parents, single people, cohabiting couples or gay couples?
Gender differences must be factored in when the structural aspect of the pension system is examined.
Women, especially those who have children, must stop treating their basic financial security as a family matter.
Second, there are considerable gender differences in pensions for workers both in the private sector and in government employ.
How much insurance is paid out for either depends largely on how long people worked after purchasing insurance and their salaries during that period.
However, because of a lack of adequate childcare, long-term care and other public services, as well as the proliferation of gender stereotypes in the workplace, many women have been trapped by family responsibilities and therefore cannot enter the job market as freely as men.
Women typically earn 80 percent of what men do. A high percentage of women work in unstable, low-income, part-time or temporary jobs.
According to last year’s labor insurance statistics, only 19.1 percent of women reached the upper earnings threshold of NT$43,900, compared with 30.59 percent of men.
Similar gender inequalities also occur when it comes to insurance for retired government employees. These disadvantageous situations are the structural limitations that cause gender inequalities in pensions.
Gender inequality in elderly people’s financial security is primarily the result of a severe lack of public care, a gender-biased job market and the institution of heterosexual marriage. It is essential that labor, childcare and long-term care policies, as well as tax reform, are taken into consideration in order to facilitate the fair redistribution of income and to ensure intergenerational equality.
The government must push through tax reform and increase tax revenues so that childcare and long-term care will be adequate, and it should also reduce gender bias in the workplace to liberate more women from household duties and enable them to enter the job market.
Lastly, the government needs to reshape the demographic pyramid, decelerate population aging and minimize the ramifications of sub-replacement fertility rates. Only then can the pension crisis be resolved.
Cheng Ching-hsia is an associate professor in the Department of Social Welfare at National Chung Cheng University. Tseng Chao-yuan is a senior researcher at the Awakening Foundation.
Translated by Ethan Zhan
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