Since January 2023, millions of people have taken to the streets across France in protest at the government's pension reform plans. Even now that the law has passed, unions have planned further action, with a national strike announced for 6 June 2023.
The pension reform will negatively impact a large proportion of low-income workers. Aside from working an extra two years, individuals will also have to have worked 43 years to claim their full pension.
The French government says the current system will go into deficit within a decade as the country's population ages and life expectancy lengthens. However, feminist activists see the pension reforms as unfair to women and say they would deepen gender inequalities.
The gender pension gap
In France, on average, women’s pensions are 40% lower than men’s are. The latest figures from the Directorate of Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics (DRESS), show that women in France received an average gross pension of €1,154 in 2020, 40% less than the €1,931 earned by men. According to the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED), quoted in Le Monde, this gap will still not have been eliminated by 2065.
It is the differences in the ‘reference salary’ (the salary over the best 25 years in the private sector or salary excluding bonuses over the final six months in the public sector) and, to a lesser extent, in the length of time that counts towards the pension, that create the pension gap between men and women. In 2022, women’s pay was 22% lower than men’s pay. These differences are more marked in the private sector than in the public sector.
A strong correlation between pensions and ‘contributory effort’ weakens the role of solidarity in determining retirement pensions. Minimum benefits play a key role in limiting pension inequalities between men and women, particularly in the top deciles. Any restriction in the allocation of these minimum benefits would have a much greater impact on women than on men at the bottom of the distribution.
Maternity leave and part-time work are not included in the 43 years contributory period. In most French households, women are responsible for childcare and part-time work is widespread among mothers. The system is designed to incite women to stay home on certain days. On Wednesday, for example, most primary schools are closed. As such, it falls on the woman to stay home with the children.
Jobs such as nursing, teaching and cleaning, often occupied by women, will be targeted by the pension reform. Staying an extra two years in this job could often be challenging and detrimental to women’s health. To compensate for the toll the reform would have on women’s pensions, the government promised to increase the minimum pensions, especially for women, up to €1,200 before tax.
Yet, not all women will be eligible for this increase because of the need to have a full quota of contribution years. Retiring at 64 does not automatically guarantee a full pension as it is only after 43 years of full-time work that individuals can claim their pension.
Trade unions have denounced the pension reforms that go against the interests of employees, and particularly women. The head of the CGT and the ‘Femmes-Mixité collective’ Sophie Binet said:
“To sell its reform, the government has once again tried to use women as a tool. And this is not the first time. In 2019-2020, the government then led by Edouard Philippe had already tried this. It wanted to introduce a points-based pension and made people believe that women would be the big winners of this reform…Bis repetita with Elisabeth Borne, and with a lot of fake news.”
In fact, a government document on the impact of the proposed changes shows that women will, indeed, be obliged to work longer than men in order to reduce the pension imbalance between the sexes.
Confronted with the government's own findings, Minister Franck Riester had to admit, “women would be slightly penalised by the increase in the retirement age” from 62 to 64. “Even the government has been forced to accept that women will be 'penalised' by the extension of the retirement age,” wrote socialist leader Olivier Faure in a twitter message. "This reform is anti-women" claimed Mathilde Panot, parliamentary leader of the hard-left France Unbowed party. "When a government minister admits that fact, that's a good reason for dropping this legislation."
In a book published in April 2023 entitled L'Enjeu féministe des retraites (Pensions as a Feminist Cause), Christiane Marty argues that the pensions reform is an opportunity to understand how the ‘existing order’ organises the precariousness of women at work. Women’s pensions are lower, careers are devalued by part-time work, maternity leave and low wages. She shows how the analysis of systemic inequalities, at work and in the domestic sphere, allows us to rethink an equitable mode of distribution, within the framework of a “politics of anti-capitalist and feminist rupture”.
In sum, earnings-related gender differences go beyond the widely acknowledged gender pay gap. The gender pay gap and working-time differences have a knock-on effect on women’s length of service and at what age they can retire, and the value of the pensions that they receive at the end of their working lives.