If you look through the federal government’s annual reports about our members’ pensions, you’ll quickly realize they are not the gold-plated pensions often described. However, one statistic may jump out at you: the gap in pension averages between our male and female members.
When taken together, the average pension of our members at year end (March 31, 2018) was $31,628. However, if you divided that average along gender lines, men had an average annual amount of $36,273 and women had an average annual amount of $27,121. That’s a gap of $9,152 or 25-per-cent.
Things get significantly worse when survivors’ pensions are considered.
The average public-service survivor pension is only $14,391. This is especially problematic for women, who make up 88-per-cent of survivors in our pension plan. The issue is even more dire when you consider the Canadian Armed Forces’ Regular Force Surviving Spouses — who massively outweigh widowers 110 to 1. Their average allowance in 2016 was $13,728 — a small pension when you consider how difficult long-term employment could be when their spouses are posted to a new location.
This isn’t specific to our membership. According to research commissioned by the Broadbent Institute, close to 30-per-cent of women aged 65-plus lived in poverty. The proportion of the population receiving the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) is higher for single women (between 44-per-cent and 48-per-cent, increasing with age) than it is for single men (between 31-per-cent and 37-per-cent).
Seniors poverty overall had been decreasing throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, however from 1995 to 2013, the low-income rate increased by 8.1 percentage points among senior women and 6.4 percentage points among senior men. This has forced many to go back into the workforce. In 2015, 53.2-per-cent of employed women aged 65 and over were working part-time. That was nearly 20-per-cent more than men of the same age.
While there is a historical context of gender roles that impacts these figures — women were a smaller part of the work force for a variety of reasons — the fact is these issues are not going away. Even today, women seniors are 8.6-per-cent less likely to have worked for pay in their lifetime than senior men. The gender pay gap continues to exist (women in Canada still earn 87 cents for every dollar earned by men), and women who have worked still work fewer years than men (as many as 10 years less on average according to a recent U.S. study).
It’s hardly a surprise that a new study by HSBC Bank Canada found that half of working-age women are worried they won’t have enough money to cover care and medical expenses once they retire.
These issues need to be taken into consideration when policy makers are crafting legislation, yet they are often forgotten. In 2017, when the federal government increased contributions to expand the Canada Pension Plan, it forgot to include the CPP child-rearing drop-out clause that had been in place since it was introduced in the 1970s. This provision existed to ensure that individuals who left the workforce or worked fewer hours to care for young children, disproportionally women, wouldn’t be penalized. It took a sustained push by organizations, including ours, to ensure the drop-out provision was included several months after the initial CPP expansion proposal was presented.