The observation is clear: in France, women are less wealthy than men. On average, they earn a salary 22% lower, a gap which narrows to 5.3% for equal positions. At retirement, this gap increased to 28% in 2018, according to the Orders. Under these conditions, as Anne-Cécile Mailfert, President of the Women’s Foundation, points out, marriage is unfortunately the best security for women. women : because the husband will earn more, and because the survivors’ pensions (part of the pension of the deceased spouse) will go more to the women, who have a life expectancy three years longer than men.
The new reform is only meant to reduce inequalities at the margins. Faced with this challenge, and faced with the risk of a long-term explosion of public debt due to our pay-as-you-go pension system, funded pensions remain a taboo. Deputy Benjamin Haddad (LREM) even uses it as a scarecrow ahead of Alexis Corbière (LFI). It’s the elephant in the room: yet, women have every interest in turning to this system, and in investing.
When you’re a woman, turning to the state to hope to earn more has something of the Stockholm syndrome. The repetition seven times between 1946 and 2014 of laws on equal pay only slowly closes the wage gap. The impossible place in a crèche or its excessive cost dissuades Work full-time : 79.5% of part-timers are women, and the proportion of part-timers increases with the number of dependent children.
Can the state really do anything about it? Inequality is not always a sign of discrimination. Women also take less lucrative paths because they exercise their choice, where in poorer and authoritarian countries, a career as an engineer or a doctor is a safe-conduct for autonomy.
The problem is not retirement. It is a world of work that does not adapt well to parenthood, imperfect childcare systems and misogynistic behavior that persists. There is so much to change that it is better, when you are a woman, to cover your back without waiting, and to invest in your future.
“When women invest, the world is better off.”
“In a funded system, it’s every man for himself. And […] it’s not women who are going to win,” says Ms. Mailfert. However, funded retirement is a chance to overcome the inequalities suffered during the career, and reduce the wealth gap. Ms. Mailfert only maintains an old stereotype : finance is for men. However, there is no barrier to entry: you can be discriminated against when hiring, but money on the financial markets has neither odor nor sex Especially since, on average, women make more responsible investments than men and more profitable long-term.
As for “every man for himself”, nothing is less certain. When women invest, the world is better off. By investing at the same rate as men, they would represent 1870 billion responsible investment dollars! Because 66% of women prefer to invest in players whose values they share. Funded retirement would make it possible to build up a provident fund, while financing social progress. Feminist savings products”gender lens feminists” emerging, dedicated to inclusive and equal actors. Who knows, if our grandmothers had invested, we might have already funded research against endometriosis?
Elsewhere, investment is a feminist priority: it is the “financial feminism”. In France, where money gets in the way and feminism has an anti-capitalist breeding ground, we stop thinking about it. However, the real rock in women’s shoes is the lack of financial culture that would allow them to take the plunge. Only 25% of French women say they are ready to invest, widening the inequalities of wealth, and leaving to men a domain that structures our world.
After decades of waiting for the State to emancipate us, are we going to tie our hands so that it ensures our subsistence, past sixty? Introducing a dose of capitalization in pensions means putting a little more in the hands of women the value they have on the labor market. It’s giving them a safety net to choose lives that suit them better, without fear of the (sur)morrow. It also frees up more responsible, longer-term investments. Finally, it means shifting the responsibility for their subsistence to the real economy, and not to future generations. Life is too short to hope for a perfectly fair world for women, but it is long enough for the financial markets to benefit them.