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CCH® PENSION AND BENEFITS — 2/7/08

Gender found to play strong role in receipt of pension benefits

Gender has been found to play a “particularly strong” role in determining whether or not workers over age 50 were receiving pension benefits in retirement, according to a study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI). The EBRI study evaluated the impact of demographic factors such as gender, age, education, and marital status on the likelihood a worker would receive employment-based retirement income.

According to the study, in 2006, women were much less likely to receive pension income, and when they did, the amounts were likely to be smaller than those for men: 44.6% of men over 65 received pension income, averaging $17,200 per year, whereas only 28.4% of women in the same age group received pension income, with a mean pension income of $11,142 per year.

EBRI attributed the gender difference to the fact that women in the over-50 age group spent fewer years in the labor force than their male counterparts or their younger female counterparts. Younger women continue the pattern of spending less time in the workforce, and at lower salaries, than men of the same age group, according to the EBRI, but younger women are spending more time in the workforce than over 50 females did. Consequently, the EBRI expects the percentage of women receiving pension benefits to increase over time.

Other findings

The study also found that, for the over-50 age group, men who had married were more likely to receive pension benefits than men who had not married, but for women, the opposite was true. For men in the over-50 age group, those that did not graduate high school were less likely than those who had graduated to be receiving pension benefits. Finally, the study revealed that, while fewer individuals in the over-50 age group received a pension from public-sector plans than private sector plans (7.5% versus 12.6%), the average public-sector pension benefit was considerably higher than the average private-sector pension benefit ($17,974 versus $8,146).

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