Full-time employment is all that matters? Quantifying the role of relevant and gender-exclusive life course experiences for gender inequalities

Gender Pension Gaps (GPG) represent crucial indicators of gender inequalities over the life course and reflect the value welfare states place on different types of work. Despite reaching higher levels, they receive less attention than other gender inequalities, such as gender wage gaps. More generally, research on gender inequalities typically focuses on selected sets of life course summary measures, predominantly the employment duration, to explain gender inequalities across the life course. Taking a life course perspective and using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) for the Netherlands and West Germany, I propose an innovative combination of machine learning, sequence analysis, and decomposition techniques, allowing for a new perspective on gender inequalities over the life course. The study contributes by disentangling which specific life course elements are most relevant for pension inequalities and quantifies the role of gender-exclusive life-course experiences for gender disparities. I find that the duration, timing, order of life-course states, and overall life course complexity matter for pension income inequalities in both pension systems. Specifically, the duration, timing, and order of care work experiences are more crucial pension predictors than employment duration, which has been the primary focus of previous research. The largest parts of the GPGs are attributable to gender-exclusive life course experiences: There is no male counterpart for the female engagement in care work, which is poorly rewarded in pension systems. Future research and policymakers likely benefit from considering such gender-specific combinations of life-course experiences and applications of the methodological approach to other inequalities.