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Men did not widely challenge the difference in state pension ages (when it was 60 for women, 65 for men) because the disparity was said to be a historical norm and, for a long time, was (mistakenly?) considered an advantage for women rather than discrimination against men.
When the pension age was eventually equalised, men did not launch widespread challenges to the resulting change, partly because it was a response to emerging evidence of longer life expectancies and a move towards greater gender equality in pension systems.
(But “pensioner” bus passes, for example, were typically equalised at age 60 rather than later ages.)
The legal argument was that equalising the pension ages was a correction of a past asymmetry, not a new (or pre-existing) discrimination.
The process of equalising state pension ages was underway by 1995, but required time to implement in order to protect older women from receiving a comparatively inadequate pension.
The intention to do this was announced in a white paper in 1993, slowly reacting to an EU (then EC) directive in 1986, which had resolved some ambiguity around pillar one statutory versus pillar two occupational pensions.
If you disregard that ambiguity and look back further for when the spirit rather than the letter of the law changed, there was an earlier EC directive in 1978.
The previous state pension change was made in the UK by the Old Age and Widows’ Pension Act 1940, for women to have a lower pension age, at a time when women tended:
- to have poorer health, arguably.
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to have far smaller pensions, as they weren’t, at that time (or even today!) equally paid, or even part of the workforce long enough in terms of opportunities, the range of available work, and often expected to leave work upon marriage.
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to be expected/required do more unpaid care work, not just childcare but looking after elderly relatives as well.
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to be required to do more unpaid work (housework), none of which was in an occupational pension.
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and married women would not receive half or even any of their husbands’ pension if he predeceased; some might receive back a lump sum of their husbands’ contributions, but by no means all.
Thus, even when getting their state pensions five years earlier, women were generally much worse off financially than their male counterparts.
Over time from then on, women did enter the workforce more and for longer, and some (but not all) unpaid care work was put in the hands of others (childcare providers, old peoples’ homes). Women’s opportunities, in terms of range of jobs and renumeration certainly increased, so at some point their pensions started more closely to approach (or exceptionally match) those of men.
Having women receive their pension earlier and on average for longer meant they may end up getting more than their male counterparts, which is why this was finally addressed from 1995, but phased in.
The original phasing was to be between 2010 and 2020, but it was then brought forward to 2018, with limited notice, and DWP have recently admitted that a form
of attention-grabbing notice planned for 2007 was then withdrawn.
Most women born in the 1940s or 1950s, however, would still have been less likely to have a comparable amount of contributions based pensions built up, so adding an extra five years to their pension age would still leave them with a smaller pension than many men.
