Why was the state pension age lower for women?

[pinksocks3]

I can't find a simple answer to this question. Why was the pension age 60 for women and 65 for men until recently?

Was it because women were seen as weaker and unable to work after 60?

Equality, but not that equality.

Apparently it was because women were typically a few years younger than their husbands, so a younger retirement age for women meant they could retire at around the same time as their husbands and were therefore likely to be available to "look after" them 😬🙄

What???!!!!

Men tended to marry younger women and this enabled both to retire at same time. Planning was for "standard couple". I got mine at 60 and DH at 65. Times are different now and many not married etc. Women also could pay lower "stamp" and rely on husband's contribution. If they also worked and opted to pay full rate they got pension at 60.

I don't know if it's an official reason but I was told by someone it was because women tend(ed) to have to look after their grandchildren/elderly relatives.

Women getting their state pension earlier also helped to cancel out some of the time taken out of the workforce to raise children.

Remember this was at the time when women working wasn't seen as a good thing. There were two rates of pension, a single person rate, and a married couple rate if both were over pension age. Had the woman's pension age been 65, when most women were a few years younger than their husband, it would have caused real difficulty for the man on a pension to support a 60 year old wife who wasn't working, and without entitlement to the couple rate for pension for another 5 years.

The pension is now unfair the other way round. The "new state pension" is nerly £50 a week hugher than the "basic state pension" and is payable to men born after 1951 ... but for women, only those born after 1953. A woman born in 1952 is getting nearly £50 a week less than she'd get if she were a man.

I didn’t know this. Is it because they got their pension at 60 whilst women after 1953 had to wait longer?

Back in the fifties (not sure when this stopped) women were expected to give up work when they married. Indeed my mum got comments when she was promoted that it wasn't fair on the married men in the office! Married women were usually part- time if they worked but could pay an additional "stamp" to equalise their pension by amount not age I think.

Interesting replies. I always wondered this, especially as women live longer.

Women born from 1950 onwards started getting their pensions gradually later and after 1953 at 65. My sister was born in 1955 and got her pension at 66.

On looking it up, this continued until 2010! It was all phased out by 2018 though.

Mind you, women have been paid less than men.

Because by the time we have gone through the menopause, we are knackered.

Ex civil servant here. Yes tye legislation behind this was indeed originally because of the age gap between men and women. Men typically marrying women around 5 years younger than themselves.

Free us up to do the unpaid labour of providing care for our elderly relatives and our grandchildren.

That's interesting.

Now that they have moved the pension age to 67, I'll be working for 12 years longer than my 9 years older DH. Oh well!

Perhaps women in naice occupations were expected to give up their job when they got married but if you were filleting fish on a freezing cold dock or slaving over a mill loom you carried on working or there was no food on the table. I’m mid-50s and both my grandmothers and my mother worked their entire lives.

It was because when the new state pension was brought in was brought in it was based on pension age, and it came during that period where women's age was catching up with men's. So at least they had their pensions earlier to compensate.

1950s man was not expected to make his own lunch, even if he had no other claims on his time.

Maybe to free them up to provide caring duties to relatives

Actually my post didn't make sense.

I won't be working 12 years longer than my DH. What I meant was after he's eligible to retire, it'll be 12 years before I will be.

I will only have worked 2 years longer than him over the course of our working lives.

My mum married in the late 40s and had to give up her dream of becoming a history teacher .... seems appalling now doesn't it. She found other jobs but was never particularly happy in any of them. Had to give that up when she adopted me and my brother in the mid/late 60s. I understand that more as we needed a constant presence in our chaotic lives at the time.

I think it was like this up until the 80s tbh. My Grandma was a primary school teacher from the 60s-00s when she retired. She had two children, one in the late 60s and one early 70s. She worked until a few days before her due date and went back when they were a few months old. She was a massive anomaly but she loved her job and didn’t want to quit, people really looked down on her. Her sisters all quit working when they had children and lived off their husband’s salary from there on out.

So the reason for lower retirement age was simply because women working wasn’t favoured anyway so not many would have still been working at that age once upon a time. The average age women got married was lower than men as well so women married slightly older men, that played a part.

I was watching a video on YouTube, originally from 1961 (link below), where the reporter was asking different men what they did around the home. It seems that a good amount of them did more than their fair share and to think it was completely on women in the 50's and 60's is in fact very wrong but is frequently brought up as if it's gospel.

Just like today, there's plenty of men who aren't lazy and want to contribute to the home.