Women’s pension pots are worth 67% of male counterparts, according to research from Bluefin Corporate Consulting.
The analysis found that women have pension savings found that this was in part due to lower salaries and lower employee contribution rates of 4.25% for women compared with 4.93% for men.
Bluefin Corporate Consulting warns that auto-enrolment might increase the gap between men’s and women’s pensions as more women work part time and so may not qualify for auto-enrolment or have low or no contributions.
Robin Hames, head of technical, marketing and research at Bluefin, says: “What’s already clear is that financial inequality is being stored up for future generations of women. Automatic enrolment, as it currently stands, is unlikely to change this.
We believe automatic enrolment will succeed in bringing millions more savers into the fold, but it will inadvertently be biased in favour of men. This is because they are more likely to earn the minimum threshold, and part time workers, who are mainly female, are more likely to miss out.”
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