Retirement Security: Women Still Face Challenges

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Over the last decade, working women’s access to and participation in employer-sponsored retirement plans have improved relative to men. Indeed, from 1998 to 2009, women surpassed men in their likelihood of working for an employer that offered a pension plan, largely because the proportion of men covered by a plan declined. Furthermore, as employers have continued to terminate their defined benefit (DB) plans and have switched to defined contribution (DC) plans, the proportion of women who worked for employers that offered a DC plan increased. Correspondingly, women’s participation rates in DC plans increased slightly over this same period while men’s participation fell, thereby narrowing the participation difference between men and women to 1 percentage point. At the same time, however, women contributed to their DC plans at lower levels than men.