Is Retirement Different for Women?

In a recent interview, I was asked the following question: 'How is retirement different for women?' 

This was my answer... I think the main advantage for women is that we're more likely to have a supportive network of family and friends around us than men are. 

And I think that we're more willing to admit that we don't know things and to seek out help when we need it than men are. 

It's a cliche but it's a good example, that when women get lost when they're out driving, they stop and ask for directions. I'm sure many of us have experienced men who would never dream of asking for directions - they just carry on driving in the hope that they'll eventually find their way again. In the same way, I think that women are much more likely to seek out help and emotional support when they need it than men are. A recent report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission says that 'Women are outstripping men in a dozen different ways that mean their lives are often better than men's lives are'. It said women are more likely to be well-educated and more likely to look after their health by eating their five daily fruit and veggies and by visiting their doctor when they first start noticing symptoms. In contrast, men don't live as long as women, they're more likely to be overweight and they're three times more likely to take their own lives - presumably because they don't have those supportive networks to turn to. 

So there are advantages to being a woman that will work in our favour in retirement. 

The big disadvantage for women is a financial one, we're more likely to be poorer than men. Although we're more likely than our mother's generation to have had jobs, we're still more likely than men to spend our retirement in poverty. According to a recent report, over three-fifths of single pensioner households here in Britain - many of which will be single female pensioner households, have a total income of less than £10,000 and another, American, report from the Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement, said that more than 1 in 10 women live on less than $10,000 a year in retirement. 

There are several reasons for this poverty and they're all to do with being female: 

Women STILL make less money than men over the course of their working lifetimes, and we don't get as many promotions as men do 

Women are more likely to have worked in low-paid jobs or to have worked part-time. We are more likely to have had time out of the workplace due to raising children or looking after elderly parents, so we have fewer years to build up our retirement savings. At the same time, during that time that we are out of the workplace, we are also losing out on years of paying into a retirement plan - and if that comes with an employer contribution, we are missing out on the employer's contribution too. 

Most women who have children, have them during their most vital career-development years. Meanwhile, our male colleagues stay in the workforce, get promotions and climb the corporate ladder. When those women return to the workforce after the kids are in school, we are usually going back in at the same level that we left at years before, or, we find that our skills are obsolete, we are going back in at a lower level. So all this puts women further behind in our careers and further behind with our retirement savings. 

There are a couple of other things that contribute to women's potential for poverty in retirement. In addition to women generally earning less than men over the course of our lifetimes, we live longer, so any money we have managed to accumulate has to last us longer. 

Then we have the fact that women tend to take care of everyone else in the family before considering our own needs and so we tend to use the money to help someone else, rather than investing it for our retirement. We will help our kids out, or we will use the money to support our elderly relatives rather than sticking this into a retirement fund. 

And, finally, as far as investment matters are concerned, women tend to be more risk-averse by nature and therefore, we are more likely to be more conservative investors, which, of course, means that, by the time we retire, we probably won't have made as much money on our investments over the course of our working lives. 

Which is all a very long-winded way of saying, yes, I think retirement IS different for women... 

 Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/expert/Ann_Harrison/33702