“Women receive $0.83 to every $1.00 a man receives in retirement income. That is a 17% gendered pension gap,” notes Kadie Philp, Commissioner and CAO of the Ontario Pay Equity Commission. “This stark reality isn’t just a number – it’s a concerning trend contributing to a notable gender disparity among older Canadians, particularly women.”
The GPG is calculated using three sources: Old Age Security and Guaranteed Income Supplement, Canadian Pension Plan/Quebec Pension Plan, and private pensions.
The research paper, Understanding the Gender Pension Gap in Canada, published by Ontario’s Pay Equity Office with Dr. Elizabeth Shilton, feminist economist and labour lawyer – says one of the issues is reliance on private pensions – “the most gender-unequal pillar” – in Canada’s three pillar system of retirement income.
It also notes that women generally do more unpaid family care work than men, weakening their opportunity to increase their share of paid work. For example, in 2017, almost 90% of insured mothers in Canada took maternity/parental leave – at reduced income level – compared with 12%% of insured fathers/partners. And in 2021, 24% of all Canadian female workers were part-time compared with 13% of all male workers with women in this cohort citing childcare responsibilities as the main reason versus 3% of men. While women’s employment rate rises with the age of their children, it never catches up with men’s.
Recently, the National Institute on Ageing has been calling for a re-framing of how we consider retirement including a shift in the focus from accumulation of retirement savings to how spending will look during the decumulation stage.