Researcher Carla Rowold: “Unpaid care work is a main reason for the gender pension gap”

Pension Day attracted many researchers from a variety of disciplines again this year. A conversation with Carla Rowold, who presented her dissertation and discussed it. Her research focused on the gender pension gap in the Netherlands and Germany. She currently works as a researcher at the German Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.

Can you talk briefly about your background?

“I studied Social Sciences at the Humboldt University of Berlin. There I focused mainly on sociology. I also worked at DIW Berlin, the German Institute for Economic Research. It was there that I started working on old age inequalities and, in particular, pension inequalities. We discovered that the pension gap between genders is ultimately the biggest.

Then I got my PhD from the University of Oxford, Nuffield College. I first wanted to write only one out of three papers of my dissertation on the gender pension gap a, since I had previously focused on it already. But there is so little research on the gender pension gap that I sticked with it as I found more and more things to look at.”

Carla Rowold

What is the paper you are presenting at Pension Day about?

“It’s about the life course elements that are most relevant for pension income, and how they relate to the gender pension gap. Most of the existing articles I found on the gender pension gap focus on the number of years a person is employed to explain the gender difference. This is quite straightforward because it is what many pension systems are based on.

However, in the other papers from my PhD, I discovered that unpaid care work plays an important role. As a result I wanted to first quantify which life course elements play the biggest role in explaining pensions and then use these relevant life course elements for explaining the gender pension gap.

Based on previous research I actually expected the number of years being full-time employed to play the biggest role for pensions. In the first step of my research, however, I discovered that the duration and timing of unpaid care work are the main predictors of pensions in the Netherlands and Germany.

In the second step of the analysis I show that life course experiences related to unpaid care work are also the main reason for the gender pension gap. This is because men do not engage in unpaid care work, but also because pension systems usually reward paid work and not unpaid work. Thus, the conservative welfare state regimes in the twentieth century in both countries facilitated highly traditional gendered division of labour and thus gender-exclusive life course experiences.

Today, however, pension systems reward men’s traditional life course experiences, mainly continuous paid full-time work, much more than women’s traditional life course experiences of large shares of unpaid care work. As a result, gender inequalities over the life course are reproduced in pension systems, resulting into large gender pension gaps in both countries, around 61% in Germany and 46% in the Netherlands.

Furthermore, it was striking that part-time work did not play such a large role. Since we know that it is a big indicator of women’s careers in both the Netherlands and Germany, I expected it to also be an important predictor of pensions, but that was not the case. I then did separate analyses by gender and found that part-time work only plays a role for women, but not so much for men.”

What do you take away from today’s presentation and discussion?

“First of all, I go home with even more motivation. There was an engaged discussion after my presentation and I appreciate having a discussant with very detailed and helpful feedback. In addition, it was highlighted that there is an International Comparative Research Grant from Netspar for international comparisons. That encourages me to maybe do a similar analysis with other countries.

For example, with register data, I can use information on income or occupational segregation over the life course. This would allow me to disentangle how persistent inequalities like the gender wage gap or the gendered occupational segregation translate into gender pension gaps.

For example, I could examine how the gendered occupational segregation, i.e., that women have ‘women-typical’ jobs and men have ‘men-typical’ jobs that often are better paid, is related to gender pension gaps.

This perspective provides for a more comprehensive insight into how more detailed gender labour market inequalities lead to pension inequalities later in life. Such analysis is not possible with the survey data I used in the research presented today. I think the Netherlands is privileged with the register data that is available for such analyses.”

How did you experience Pension Day?

“I really liked Pension Day. The atmosphere is very nice and open. Furthermore, as mentioned, the discussions in the sessions are very engaged and if there is not enough room for that, participants approach you afterwards for detailed questions. Finally, the program has a nice coverage of different topics and perspectives.”