Open AccessBeyond the pay gap: The retirement disadvantage of being female
Author(s) -
Merewyn Groom
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
policy quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2324-1101
pISSN - 2324-1098
DOI - 10.26686/pq.v14i1.4755
Subject(s) - disadvantage , workforce , demographic economics , promotion (chess) , gender pay gap , labour economics , paid work , work (physics) , economics , affect (linguistics) , gender gap , business , wage , political science , sociology , economic growth , working hours , law , engineering , mechanical engineering , communication , politics
The gender pay gap in New Zealand is often discussed in terms of hourly wages or represented by the idea that women effectively work for free from 14 November until the New Year (Lawless, 2017). What isn’t often considered is how the disparities in earning, promotion opportunities and time out of the workforce for family can compound into an exponential affect on retirement savings, like so much interest never received. According to the ANZ bank, the average woman retiring in 2017 will have $80,000 less in her KiwiSaver account than if she were male (Edmunds, 2017b), and the gap is growing: back in 2015 it was $60,000 (Parker, 2017; ANZ, 2015).