Social Security, Poverty and Pension Benefits

Subject: Sociology
Pages: 1
Words: 283
Reading time:
< 1 min

Older women are more apt to live in poverty than older men because women reach their retirement threshold when they have lesser financial resources than men. This is due to the fact that women age faster than men, thus when women are retiring at the age of 60 years, men might be retiring at the age of 65 or 70 years. Therefore, men are most likely to have more financial resources than women. In addition, some fewer women have a career or professions compared to men, thus very few of them get well-paying jobs and are able to save.

Primarily, social security system refers to a social insurance system that offers security against socially identified situations like old age, poverty, and unemployment. In order for one to qualify for the system, one must be working, thus most of the individuals are left out, especially the poor, women, disabled individuals, and unemployed people. After a lifetime of labor, some of the workers have inadequate social security and pension benefits because they do not have enough contributions in case the amount set is too high. The failure to have enough contributions could be due to the fact that the individuals are not earning adequate cash to make such contributions.

Similarly, gender can affect social security and pension benefits since women face more job discontinuity than men. Thus, they could have had fewer chances of getting or developing their professional goals in their lifetime. Therefore, they end up in lower-paid jobs. Thus, due to the more non-continuous employment history and the lower-paid jobs, women covered by the social security and pension benefits are fewer than men.