Flexibility won't stop women retiring in Poverty

I came across a story in a small online independent Australian paper called Newmatilda that is interesting and which makes some important points for women and governments in all countries. Newmatilda is well worth taking a look at as it has many interesting and provocative stories

The post was written by Petra Bueskens on October 30, of last year. The post is called Flexibility won't stop women retiring in Poverty.  Some background, in Australia, if you are working you pay into a Superannuation fund over your working life and when you retire, that fund is used as your pension.

The problem is that women, take time out of work to raise children and when they are working earn only 72% of what a man makes. The Australian government is trying to close the pension gap between men and women. A commendable goal, but as your read the article, you realize that they are not going to be successful. All neoliberal models give freedom of choice to men and to women and in their model women are free as individuals to work and earn as much as they want, which is not how society works.

The entire article is worth a read, but I will highlight some of the points I found interesting and important below:

The majority of women don’t earn enough to be able to do so and their “disrupted” work histories – note the assumption that care is a “disruption” – mean their contributions, even if increased while on maternity leave, will not be comparable with men’s.

The pay gap is one issue here. Women working full-time earn 18 percent less than men and, over a lifetime, this makes a significant difference.

The suggestions Morrison is putting on the table fail to address this basic issue – that work culture is incompatible with caregiving and thus the majority of women earn significantly less than men over their lifetime.

Women take “time out” to care for children and time out to care for aging and ailing relatives. Basically women are doing the caring, or what anthropologists more poetically call the “kin keeping”. This is the social and emotional glue that ties us all into relationships, families and communities

In the neoliberal model women are free as individuals to work and earn as much as they want (or can), but as mothers they are constrained to a life of unremunerated care. Of course, they are now somehow expected to do both without adequate structural or social support

As Professor Treas also showed, although women try to resolve the contradictions between work and home individually, in fact they are systemic issues that can only be resolved at a systemic level.

Sentimentality about motherhood doesn’t pay the rent or put food on the table and it doesn’t pay the electricity bill for an older single woman who has spent a lifetime caring for others and who now faces a society who cannot, or rather will not, care for her.

One innovative way of ameliorating the pervasive feminisation of poverty is the introduction of a universal basic income. This would redistribute wealth across the population and in particular to the poorest sectors of the community, which as is well known, is overwhelmingly made of women and their dependents.

As foremost scholar of basic income, Professor Carole Pateman argues the introduction of basic income both democratises citizenship and breaks down the “the mutual reinforcement of the institutions of marriage, employment, and citizenship”. Basic income is something politicians need to put onto the table if they truly want to ameliorate gender gaps in wealth and stop women accumulating poverty over their lifetimes.

Ageism

To  End Ageism, the 'Old' Must Demand Respect

For the most part, the old and oldest in our population have done little if anything to show they are worthy of the respect and dignity they deserve if for nothing else then the significant contributions they made throughout their live
The following is from the Old Women's Project: and is a step in demanding respect:

WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT:

Old women must be treated as equal to other adults. 

We reject both contempt and "respect" on the basis of age, but rather celebrate honest exchange between generations. 

If we can have relations of equality, people can see for themselves whether we have "wisdom and experience." 

Some of us do. (Sometimes old women fall into wanting "honor and respect" just because women get so little respect throughout our lives that we feel we should at least get some pay-off at the end. 

Besides, we're aware that if we don't get special "respect," we usually end up with special contempt. But we also remember when "respect" for women was used as a reason to deny us the vote.)

Old women can and must speak out to demand this equality for ourselves and other old women. This breaks the taboo against old women asking for ourselves rather than for "future generations." 

But our own lives matter, and future generations of old women depend on us to end ageism.

Ageism disempowers all women. As long as younger women gain false power by distancing themselves from old women, the 35-year-old loses power by not being 25.

The word "old" is a statement of fact, not a matter of shame. We claim it, believing that as long as it is humiliating to be called old, it will be humiliating to be old.