Engender blog
Guest Blog: Why do older women in Scotland experience further financial inequality?
Women experience high levels of pension inequality, due to women’s care responsibilities, part-time work, occupational segregation, the gender pay gap and maternity and gender discrimination at work, reducing women’s access to both state and private pensions. In this guest blog, Louise Brady from Independent Age explores the links between state pensions and gender inequality, what we can learn from the Older People’s Economic Wellbeing Index, and what needs to change.
The income gap that exists for women in Scotland during their working lives doesn’t end when they reach State Pension age. It persists - with lower wages, inadequate social security payments and time out of the recognised labour force due to caring responsibilities all negatively impacting savings, pensions and overall finances as women grow older.
It’s unacceptable that 96,782 pension-aged women in Scotland today live in poverty, with many more living just above this threshold.
The UK State Pension and gender inequality
The full amount of the UK’s new State Pension (paid to those who turned State Pension age after 2016) in the last financial year was just over £11,500 or £221.20 per week. On average, the weekly amount of new State Pension received by women in Scotland last August was around £5 less than men (£211.22 compared to £216.30), and £10 less per week than the maximum amount (or £520 less annually).
To get the maximum weekly payment amount, older people need to have paid 35 years of National Insurance contributions based on full-time work. According to the latest Scotland Census, women who are currently working are almost 4 times more likely than men to be in part-time jobs. Going by current rules, many of these women will receive less than the maximum amount of the new State Pension when they reach pensionable age.
However, it’s important to note that most older people (63%) in Scotland, including 70% of women, receive the pre-2016 State Pension instead (often referred to as the ‘old’ State Pension). The maximum amount for this is even lower – for financial year 2024/25 it was £169.50 per week or £8,814 a year.
While the rules and detail for the old State Pension are complex, the gendered income gap here is clear. The latest available data shows that last August only 77% of women in Scotland on the old State Pension received the full weekly amount, compared to 97% of men.
The Older People’s Economic Wellbeing Index: Scotland 24-25
When looking at the drivers of poverty among older women in Scotland, the income gap that extends from working age to pension age is central. At Independent Age we recently published research which found that 68% of women in Scotland receive a pension from a former employer, compared to 75% of men. And while 26% of men receive income from a personal pension, this falls to 17% of women.
Our research can be found in the Older People’s Economic Wellbeing Index: Scotland, 2024-25, the first of an annual series of nationally representative polling of people aged 66 and over in Scotland, designed to gain a further understanding of the financial wellbeing and lives of older people.
The Index highlights the experiences of pensioners in Scotland who are more likely to live in poverty, including people with caring responsibilities, people who have a disability or health condition, renters, and unsurprisingly, women.
Shockingly, one quarter (24%) of older women reported having an income of less than £15,000. This is compared to 13% of men.
Older people were asked about the actions they’d taken as a result of financial difficulties, with the results revealing that women more likely than men to report that they occasionally skipped meals (13%; 9%), at least occasionally reduce the quality of their food (28%; 22%), frequently or always cut back on heating or utilities (23%; 17%), and frequently or always reduce their social interactions (14%; 11%).
The poll also looked at the experiences of one-person pensioner households, a group which is disproportionally made up of women (about 70%). Official statistics show that 22% (one in five) women above the State Pension age who live alone also live in poverty, compared to 16% (one in seven) of one-person male pensioner households.
What needs to change
The results from our first Older People’s Economic Wellbeing Index: Scotland provide further evidence on the persistence and impact of the gendered income gap for older women. For next year’s edition of the Older People’s Economic Wellbeing Index to show improvements across all areas, urgent action is needed.
The Scottish Government should introduce a strategy to tackle pensioner poverty by using devolved powers as far as possible. The UK Government needs to ensure that reserved social security entitlements, including the State Pension and Pension Credit, are set at an adequate level.
Policy makers across both Parliaments need to consider the reasons why some pensioners are more likely to live in poverty than others. Addressing the inequalities women face during their working age lives, and ensuring the social security system is adequate and affords a decent standard of life is central to reducing pensioner poverty, and the disproportionate impact of it that is experienced by women.
You can read the first Older People’s Economic Wellbeing Index from Independent Age here.
If you’re over State Pension age and struggling financially, you can find information from Independent Age on their website or you can call their Helpline on 0800 319 6789. To hear more about Independent Age’s policy and public affairs work in Scotland, please contact Scotlandpublicaffairs@independentage.org.
Guest posts do not necessarily reflect the views of Engender, and all language used is the author’s own. Bloggers may have received some editorial support from Engender, and may have received a fee from our commissioning pot. We aim for our blog to reflect a range of feminist viewpoints, and offer a commissioning pot to ensure that women do not have to offer their time or words for free.
Interested in writing for the Engender blog? Find out more here.
Tell us about your experiences of workplace sexual harassment
Over the past year, Engender have been thinking about what needs to change to eradicate sexual harassment at work. Now we are asking women in Scotland to tell us about their experiences of sexual and sexist harassment in the workplace.
We outlined our approach to this project in a blog post in April 2021, which has included convening an Expert Working Group to generate policy recommendations aimed at preventing and better responding to harassment; commissioning a literature review on anonymous reporting of sexual harassment; and engaging with women with lived experience of harassment.
Women’s experiences of sexual harassment in Scotland
Harassment tends to be normalised in the workplace and beyond, meaning that many women doubt that their experiences are serious enough to report, or that they happened at all. Behaviours constituting harassment tend to be minimised, with the suggestion being that women have invited it in some way or that it is harmless ‘banter’. Of course, this is never the case.
Tackling sexual and sexist harassment in the workplace
Engender is working to explore how we can prevent sexual and sexist harassment in the workplace and improve outcomes for victim-survivors as part of a project funded by grant-making charity Rosa. Here, our Policy Officer Mariah Kelly gives an overview of the scale of the issue and the work of the project:
Guest Post: Mainstreaming Spotlight - Close the Gap
To mark the release of Engender's new report, What Works for Women: Improving gender mainstreaming in Scotland, we're sharing how mainstreaming is important to the work of some of Scotland's equalities organisations. Here, Lindsey Millen from Close the Gap talks about how mainstreaming is essential for their work on women's labour market participation.
Why is gender mainstreaming important to your organisation?
Gender mainstreaming is critical to delivering women’s labour market equality and, in doing so, tackle wider gender inequality. Many of the causes of the gender pay gap are not unlawful, e.g. the lack of quality flexible working at senior levels and a lack of affordable wraparound childcare. In order to tackle these issues, gender must be at the heart of policymaking. Policy that responds to the specific experiences of women is also better quality and better value for money – put simply, it delivers for everyone. Gender mainstreaming is such a valuable tool for policymakers and we need to see it being used effectively.
What area(s) of mainstreaming are you focused on?
Close the Gap works on women’s labour market inequality, which includes policy advocacy and employer engagement. The Scottish-specific duties of the public sector equality duty (PSED) are a big focus for us as they require public bodies to mainstream gender across all of their functions. We are interested in how public bodies are using their gender pay gap, occupational segregation and employment data to do gender mainstreaming. This supports our work to advocate for a duty that delivers for women and has formed the basis for our employer guidance on PSED and the work we do to support individual public bodies to improve their compliance.
If you could snap your fingers and change one thing to make gender mainstreaming happen, what would it be?
It is difficult to pick just one thing and there are really three things that have to work in concert in order for gender mainstreaming to happen. Firstly, public bodies need support to develop their understanding of gender inequality and how this relates to the work they do. Without this it’s difficult to develop good quality solutions. Secondly, we need to see real accountability for public bodies to ensure gender mainstreaming is done – and done well. Thirdly, we need leadership at the most senior levels of public bodies that makes clear gender mainstreaming is a core part of their work as public service providers, employers, and in their other roles.
Where can people find out more about your work on mainstreaming?
A good place to start would be our assessments of public bodies’ performance of the duties – here and here. Public sector employers (and PSED geeks) will find our guidance helpful in developing their work on gender mainstreaming and the duties in general – this can be found here. Gender mainstreaming is woven throughout our work – there’s plenty of other content to be found on our website.#MakingWorkVisible for International Women's Day 2020
Every International Women's Day, we ask women across Scotland to share their days with us, to highlight the unpaid, undervalued, and invisible work done by women in Scotland.
This includes the low-paid (and falsely-named 'unskilled') work which is dominated by women, the unpaid care work happening in houses across the country, household chores which are unevenly distributed (even if men think they are equally shared), and all of the mental labour which women are - say it with me now - "just naturally better at".
While the irony of asking women to live-tweet their days, thus adding to their to-do list, isn't lost on us, it's important to take the time to reflect on the gendered nature of what we see as 'work'. Not to call out partners who aren't pulling their weight (although that can be a pleasing side-effect), or to humblebrag about how much work we are doing, but because work which is vital to the wellbeing of all of us - volunteering, kinship care, marking celebrations, raising children - is still widely done by women.
This year, tweets highlighted the work that goes in to caring - the practical tasks and admin, the emotional cost of supporting a loved one, the additional strain which fears over coronavirus cause; the mental work which has to happen on a Sunday to make sure everyone goes to work or school with clean clothes, completed homework, and a packed lunch; the effort which goes into being social, into hosting friends, remembering birthdays, and keeping track of who's going where. Check out the #MakingWorkVisible hashtag to see more.
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