As populations age and revenues diminish, government and private pension funds around the world are facing insolvency. The looming social security crisis is especially dire for women, who live longer than men but have worked less in the formal labor force. This groundbreaking study examines alternative social security systems and their disparate impacts on men and women. Emphasis is placed on the new multi-pillar systems that combine a publicly managed benefit and a mandatory private retirement saving plan. The Gender Impact of Social Security Reform compares the gendered outcomes of social security systems in Chile, Argentina, and Mexico, and presents empirical findings from Eastern and Central European transition economies as well as several OECD countries. Women’s positions have improved relative to men in countries where joint pensions have been required, widows who have worked can keep the joint pension in addition to their own benefit, the public benefit has been targeted toward low earners, and women’s retirement age has been raised to equality with that of men. The Gender Impact of Social Security Reform will force economists and policy makers to reexamine the design features that enable social security systems to achieve desirable gender outcomes.

Aging populations are creating tremendous pressures on social security systems throughout the world, lifting the need for reform to the top of policy agendas. Proposed reforms often have different implications for men and women. At the same time, traditional family and gender roles are changing with the decline in fertility rates and the rapid rise in women's participation in the paid labor force.While trying to adapt social security systems to the fiscal demands of aging societies, policymakers face the compelling challenge of how to design pension reforms that achieve fair outcomes for women. Gender and Social Security Reform examines how different countries are attempting to meet this challenge. Drawing on comparative studies of European and Latin American countries along with a series of case studies of individual countries, the book provides insights into the gender dimensions of alternative designs for reform. All of the countries studied have recently reformed or are about to reform their pension systems, with a clear trend towards tightening the link between contributions and benefits in order to secure the long-term sustainability of pensions. The book also alerts policymakers to other issues: Should pension systems be gender-neutral or compensate for inequalities in paid and unpaid labor? Does compensation preserve gender discrimination? Are unisex life tables a reliable or fair redistributive tool for women? Or should annuities be linked directly to life expectancy, differentiated by sex and potentially other factors? Does a minimum pension guarantee risk compromising the principle of individual responsibility and work? How can recognition for caring work be balanced with work incentives? What can be done to help social security systems preserve freedom of choice in terms of work-family balance for women, men or the modem family unit as a whole?In analyzing the gender implications of recent social security policies and practices

Aging populations are creating tremendous pressures on social security systems throughout the world, lifting the need for reform to the top of policy agendas. Proposed reforms often have different implications for men and women. At the same time, traditional family and gender roles are changing with the decline in fertility rates and the rapid rise in women's participation in the paid labor force. While trying to adapt social security systems to the fiscal demands of aging societies, policymakers face the compelling challenge of how to design pension reforms that achieve fair outcomes for women. Gender and Social Security Reform examines how different countries are attempting to meet this challenge. Drawing on comparative studies of European and Latin American countries along with a series of case studies of individual countries, the book provides insights into the gender dimensions of alternative designs for reform. All of the countries studied have recently reformed or are about to reform their pension systems, with a clear trend towards tightening the link between contributions and benefits in order to secure the long-term sustainability of pensions. The book also alerts policymakers to other issues: Should pension systems be gender-neutral or compensate for inequalities in paid and unpaid labor? Does compensation preserve gender discrimination? Are unisex life tables a reliable or fair redistributive tool for women? Or should annuities be linked directly to life expectancy, differentiated by sex and potentially other factors? Does a minimum pension guarantee risk compromising the principle of individual responsibility and work? How can recognition for caring work be balanced with work incentives? What can be done to help social security systems preserve freedom of choice in terms of work-family balance for women, men or the modem family unit as a whole? In analyzing the gender implications of recent social security policies and practices this book reframes the conventional discourse of reform. Neil Gilbert is the Chemin Professor of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books include Changing Patterns of Social Protection (edited with Rebecca A. Van Voorhis), Welfare Reform: A Comparative Assessment of the French and U.S. Experiences (edited with Antoine Parent), and Transformation of the Welfare State.

This ninth phase of the International Social Security project, which studies the experiences of twelve developed countries, examines the effects of public pension reform on employment at older ages. In the past two decades, men’s labor force participation at older ages has increased, reversing a long-term pattern of decline; participation rates for older women have increased dramatically as well. While better health, more education, and changes in labor-supply behavior of married couples may have affected this trend, these factors alone cannot explain the magnitude of the employment increase or its large variation across countries. The studies in this volume explore how financial incentives to work at older ages have evolved as a result of public pension reforms since 1980 and how these changes have affected retirement behavior. Utilizing a common template to analyze the developments across countries, the findings suggest that social security reforms have strengthened the financial returns to working at older ages and that these enhanced financial incentives have contributed to the rise in late-life employment.

Social security is the largest and perhaps the most popular program run by the federal government. Given the projected increase in both individual life expectancy and sheer number of retirees, however, the current system faces an eventual overload. Alternative proposals have emerged, ranging from reductions in future benefits to a rise in taxrevenue to various forms of investment-based personal retirement accounts. As this volume suggests, the distributional consequences of these proposals are substantially different and may disproportionately affect those groups who depend on social security to avoid poverty in old age. Together, these studies persuasively show that appropriately designed investment-based social security reforms can effectively reduce the long-term burden of an aging society on future taxpayers, increase the expected future income of retirees, and mitigate poverty rates among the elderly.

Despite recent economic gains for women, a substantial gender gap in financial security during old age remains, making women more dependent than men upon Social Security. This paper discusses the important role that Social Security plays in providing for women's economic security. It also analyzes the implications for women of several proposed changes in Social Security policy, including the call for the partial privatization of Social Security via the introduction of individual accounts. Many of the proposals would have the effect of asking women, particularly low-income women, to shoulder a disproportionate share of the risks and burdens associated with the changes.