Social Insurance Systems: When Gender Matters and When It Doesnt
This article reprinted with kind permission of Gender Matters Quarterly
Weaving gender into a countrys social safety net isnt a simple task: there are times when gender must matter and times when it should not.
Industrialized countries have established social insurance systems that blend private and public sector programs to protect workers and their dependents if the family breadwinner is no longer capable of earning a living. These include programs that provide benefits in the event of disability, job-related injuries, unemployment, old age or death.
This excludes from coverage most agricultural employment, occasional or part-time employment, domestic service, and informal sector employment – sectors in which women workers often predominate. The International Labour Organization considers this exclusion to be a form of indirect discrimination against women workers.
A second form of de facto discrimination arises when social insurance programs are financed by participating workers payroll contributions and when benefits are determined by a workers employment and earning history. Because women frequently interrupt their employment because of childbirth or the need to care for family dependents, they may either have their benefits reduced to reflect their absences from the workforce or lose eligibility for long-term benefits altogether.
Because lower paying jobs generate lower benefit payments in payroll-dependent insurance plans, indirect gender discrimination is aggravated by the persistent differential in womens earnings compared with those of male counterparts.
The International Labour Organization also identifies features of many social insurance systems that directly discriminate against women. Contributions and benefits associated with employment-based programs are often computed using actuarial calculations made separately for men and women.
These calculations may reflect different life expectancy rates, risks of injury, or health care requirements. As a result, women workers are required to contribute more of their earnings to these programs and receive less in benefits than do their male counterparts. Social insurance systems, the International Labour Organization argues, ought to pool these risks evenly among all participants. Contribution and benefit schedules are examples of instance in which gender should not matter when designing social insurance systems.
Direct discrimination also occurs when women workers who are married are denied benefits because programs presume their needs will be met through the incomes (or benefits) earned by their husbands. In these cases, married women cannot acquire personal rights to program benefits. This problem can arise even if the married woman is the sole source of support for a dependent family whether a husband is present or not.
The social insurance systems established by the heavily industrialized economies were built around the concept of women as dependent spouses in legally bound marriages, whose earnings from economic activity would be supplementary family incomes. This concept no longer fits economic reality, if it ever did, as women increasingly take formal sector employment and acquire independent rights to unemployment insurance, pension and health care benefits.
As developing nations look to existing models for guidance in devising safety nets to protect workers and families from economic reversals, reliance on payroll-based programs should be tempered with a recognition that these systems usually provide women fewer benefits and require greater contributions.
USAID Office of Women in Development
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