Women’s super gap isn’t just a data point. It’s a ticking time bomb |
There’s new data out this week on retirement confidence in Australia, and it makes for uncomfortable reading. Only 41 per cent of women say they feel financially confident about retirement. For men, it’s 59 per cent. That gap – of nearly 20 per cent – should stop us in our tracks.
Dig a little deeper and the worry is everywhere. Nearly three-quarters of women are concerned about having enough super for retirement, compared with just over half of men. Seven in ten fear they won’t be able to afford the lifestyle they want later in life. More than half are already holding back on everyday spending because they’re worried about running out of money in retirement.
Women typically have lower super balances than men as they are more likely to take time off work to raise children.Credit: Simon Letch
This isn’t a single data point or a momentary wobble in confidence. Women report higher levels of worry across every measure. It would be easy to describe this as anxiety and brush it off, but that would be a mistake.
These findings come from AMP’s Retirement Confidence Pulse, an important piece of research that tracks how Australians feel about their financial futures. As Melinda Howes, AMP’s Group Executive for Superannuation and Investments, put it: “We cannot accept a future where Australian women remain more worried than men about their financial futures.”
What the data really shows is not anxiety, but smart realism. Women are responding rationally to the reality of their financial lives, in a retirement system that has never fully accounted for the fact that women have more fractured working lives than men, even today.
They still earn less. They still take on more caring roles. And they still live longer than their partners if they have one. All of that collides in retirement.
This can’t be about asking women to work harder or sacrifice more. It needs to be about helping women have a voice.
So when women say they’re worried, it’s not because they haven’t thought about retirement enough. It’s because they have. They can see the social and financial realities facing single women later in life, and they understand how exposed retirement can be if things don’t go to plan.
What often gets overlooked is that women are not disengaged from the future. In fact, many think about........