Introduction

There is a school of thought that claims that women do not know much about pensions, do not understand them, and therefore do not join schemes or pay large sums out of their wages into personal pensions. If women understood pensions rather better, this argument goes, everything would be fine. This view was epitomised in the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) 2002 Pensions Green Paper, which had a concluding section on women and pensions, tacked on rather as an afterthought. It went through a reasonably sound analysis of women's pension position, and its roots in their employment position and caring roles, and then concluded with one single action point:

This chapter is based on a literature review carried out in 2004 for the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC). That project was not a direct response to the DWP Green Paper, or to its approach to women's pensions issues, but it lay in the background. The project took the form of a literature search of readily available publications, taking 1995 as a fairly arbitrary starting point, because so much had changed in the decade after that. This was not a totally rigid criterion, however. For example, Field and Prior's 1996 report for the then Department of Social Security (DSS), Women and Pensions, was based on fieldwork in 1994-95, but was simply too central to the concerns of the review to omit. Nor was the research confined to academic literature or official publications. It includes a fair amount of material, though mostly rather superficial, from bodies such as the Association of British Insurers and other organisations that commission opinion polls and questions in omnibus market research surveys. Some searches were also carried out for useful non-UK material, in particular from Australia and the US, though these would not claim to be universal.