Radical Statistics The Journal The Subjects The Books News Links About Home What does the future hold for women? Connecting gender, pension scheme participation and earnings. Debora Price 5 The real pension problem for women: ignoring the gender dimension Pension scheme participation during the working life is a matter of growing interest to policy makers, economists and other academics. This is particularly so with the closing down of salary-related occupational pension schemes, and increasing reliance in the UK on schemes based on contributions, which build up a fund from which an annuity will be purchased at retirement. Between 1993 and 2002, the Analytical Services Division of the Department of Social Security (1) published no less than fourteen reports on the subject, with others of peripheral relevance (DWP 2002). Within many of these, distinctions based on gender are marginalized. For example, Hedges, in an exploration of retirement planning, devotes two out of 123 pages to the subject, noting principally that women - even young women - seem to depend heavily on their husbands for pension provision; a finding that some might think warranted more emphasis (Hedges 1998: 121-122). In a report on the incomes and living standards of older people, despite the known poverty of older women, gender is hardly mentioned (Whiteford and Kennedy 1995). Where gender is specifically covered, the results are always of concern. Women are much more likely than men not to belong to a pension scheme or to have lost their rights in a pension scheme; and while during the 1990s, occupational scheme receipts increased for men with each cohort, the same was not true for women (Stears 1997: 170). Indeed, Falkingham and Rake have commented that concern about whether women will have enough income to support themselves in retirement " emerges starkly from virtually every report on pension income" (Falkingham and Rake 2001: 67). Those concerned about or directly addressing gender issues tend to report on pension coverage - that is numbers and proportions participating in different types of pension schemes (see for example Burton 1997; McKay, et al. 2000; Ginn and Arber 2000). This type of research tends to show that pension coverage between women working full time and men working full time is