Teenage Take over #3
- April 30, 2023
- Written by Luke Quinn
- 12 months ago
- No Comments
The teenagers takeover for a third time
Take over 3 already!! Yes it’s that time again, but I guess time just flies if you have an entire 2 week break (for us, the Easter holidays flew by and we had another deadline and exams before we knew it).
Diversity, inclusion and equality is one of the hottest topics nowadays and one thing of key prominence is the gender pay gap. But what does not come to light so much is a gender pension gap which is alarmingly much much higher – we had no idea about this before we watched the Martin Lewis pension special and it really got us talking. There’s big steps being taken to solve the gender pay gap, but it still exists! The gender pension gap looks much harder to solve.
And that’s what we’re continuing with in this teenage takeover.
Why does gender affect your pay or your pension?
Once we started talking about this and thinking, we realised that we still live in a world where gender does come with expectations. Women are more likely to take more time off work to have a family and more likely to end up working part time due to child care. But may have lower pay to start with (compared to men). All of these factors mean that women save much less into a pension, especially as most pension contributions are a percentage of pay. However women usually live longer, and this magnifies the inequalities, with a smaller amount that needs to last a longer period of time – that equates to needing to work 18 more years just to get the same pension as men do! (On average.)
The way Jess sees it...
From a girl’s point of view, it is almost as if I haven’t even started my life properly yet and Luke already has a head start. I hadn’t ever really thought about inequality as a problem, we do all get the same lessons and opportunities in school, but gender inequality still clearly exists. And in some respects we are more unequal than ever! My mum stays at home and my dad runs his own business, so my mum looks after the three of us and the running of the house. But if she worked full time too I think the school would still call her if we were ill and she would still do the housework.
We need to make the balance of roles fairer and the pay. However, I don’t know how you make pensions fair and reward people for their work. Should everyone have the same pension? Everyone should start off on an even playing field with the same opportunities as one another. The rest seems very hard to solve.
From Luke's point of view...
I had never really thought about having an unfair advantage in any way. But the more we chatted this through the more I realised that the roots run deep in society. I wish Jess and I had the answer, but realistically this will be an issue for all of us to deal with for many years to come, possibly lasting many more generations. However, just because it could take a long time and won’t be easy does not mean that we should delay any effort to progress solving the problem.
But having said that, like Jess, I’m not sure how to answer the fairness versus reward debate. Next year I’ll sit my GCSE’s I’ll work hard and hope to do well. I expect to get better grades than the people who don’t do any work.
What's the answer?
Clearly the answer should be that just because you’re a girl you don’t earn less or have less in your pension. How do you make that work in reality is a question that we could not answer. We went round in circles about injustice, reward and fairness.
That’s all for this time round, we usually end up talking about how much we learnt at this point. But this time was a little different, we just discussed what’s been on our minds the most and how we felt.
We must say, thank you for all of the feedback we have been getting and to everyone that has taken the time to read our ramblings, it has been absolutely awesome to see literally thousands of views on the analytics! Until next time.