With international women’s day fast approaching, there has been a lot of talk about how to better engage women with their pensions and investments, and it’s an important issue that the industry needs to be aware of and working towards improving. Especially with recent research stating that women’s annual private pension income is 55 per cent lower than that of men.

But with another new study exposing the ‘worrying’ trends amongst women every day, these are issues that arguably, should be considered on a much broader scale. I simply can’t believe that I am the only woman reading this research and feeling, well, patronised.

I’ve never once received a press release detailing male attitudes towards pensions vocabulary, or enquiring as to whether men are overwhelmed or confused by their pension. But they are abundant for women.

Equally, women aren’t “trailing” or “lagging” behind – this would imply that we have actively chosen to contribute less, that we don’t want a sufficient pension, or simply that we can’t quite wrap our head around the idea of a pension.

In fact, recent statistics from the DWP revealed that self-employed men had actually shown more of a decline in participation rates than self-employed women since 2006. While if the definition for participation was expanded to include retained pensions, which would often include women on career breaks, female participation amongst the self-employed would actually be in line with that of self-employed men.

Part of the problem then is that much of the gender gap stems from issues that are not of our own making.

For example, DWP statistics caused quite a stir recently, after revealing that three quarters of the low-earners who missed out on government tax relief for their pension contributions in 2016/17 were women. These women are caught in a loophole, above the auto-enrolment threshold but under the personal allowance. They are stuck between a rock and a hard place, with little to no incentive to save.

Add into this the fact that the majority of carers are women, whether this is in a maternal capacity or otherwise, and the fact that these women are often forced to take extended periods of time off from work in order to meet their caring duties, and the gender gap becomes much less surprising.

There’s so much more that feeds into this issue, social stigma, the impact of divorce, unconscious (as well as just plain conscious) bias. Yet we are so keen to reduce the matter to gender, to say that women simply don’t understand their pension. But the truth is, no one genuinely does.

Regardless of gender, age, or even industry I would argue that no one can truly know everything about pensions. (If you disagree, I am happy to quiz you on the 100,000 plus pages of pensions legislation to put you to the test).

Broader reform is needed to address many of the issues facing women, so this responsibility doesn’t sit entirely with the pensions industry. But it is interesting that in the run up to international women’s day, people seem to be doing very little talking about the achievements of women within the industry.

I am very privileged to be surrounded by incredibly inspirational women (and men), who work hard to ensure an inclusive and diverse workplace. In fact, I’m lucky to work in an industry that shares these views more broadly. Perhaps then, if we gave members the same benefit of the doubt that we do to each other, we would start to understand the nuances that can emerge when it comes to the pensions gender gap.

Improving genuine personalisation is the first step in this. We are much more than the sum of our parts – whether it is gender, age or race. Genuinely adapting to members as people, rather than data or simply a tick in a column, is a good place to start.

Equally, whilst tips to help women understand their pension are an excellent step, maybe we can just make them tips to help humans start saving and investing. We’re all hoping to grow old after all.

So don’t patronise us women by telling us what we don’t understand and why we don’t understand it, simply support us until we do understand it.

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