Pensions at heart of efforts to close gender gap

Irish Rural Link promotes farm safety; the group is also a champion of pensions gender balance. 

In America, they’re known as the ‘flyover’ states. You can look down on them for much of the journey if you travel by aeroplane from the crowded eastern cities to anywhere on the West Coast. 

Sparsely populated, their shared characteristics include an economic dependency on agriculture and a geographic separation from the lucrative income opportunities of the industrial, financial and political power centres.

Ireland is far too small for a direct comparison, but a loose equivalence is from when you drive past the ultra-high-tech Intel campus in Leixlip to the approach to Oranmore and the innovative med tech hubs that cluster around all those roundabouts.

The ‘flyover’ states and ‘drive-through’ counties have several things in common, and most of them are good. Cleaner air, beautiful countryside, warmer welcomes, community attachment and much more time to smell roses than in the cities. They are also united in some challenges and difficulties.

Asymmetric employment and earning opportunities between rural and urban economies often lead to structural economic imbalances that disproportionately impact certain cohorts of citizens. 

One stubborn imbalance is in the provision, or to put it more precisely, the lack of provision of meaningful pension options to women who live and work in the rural parts of Ireland. Tara Farrell spends much of her time trying to mitigate the consequences of this societal wrinkle.

“It is a national issue,” says Farrell. “I’m not sure I’d say it’s a bias, but there are differences that rural women face that perhaps their urban counterparts don’t. Rural women, for instance, will do a lot of unpaid farmwork without being the registered farm owner. It’s not just farmers' wives; it could be sisters, daughters, anybody. 

Women march during a demonstration as part of International Women's Day, Wednesday, March 8, 2023, in Paris. Feminist activists see the pension reform as unfair to women, especially because they say it would further deepen gender inequalities faced during their careers. 

"As far as I remember, female ownership of farms is a little over 13% so if you factor that with caring responsibilities along with limited childcare services and lack of good public transport services, that all has an impact. So, we may have a rural woman, for instance, who was in paid employment but might leave that when her children are young. And if she works on the farm, then her work is unpaid, and she is not registered, there will be no PSRI payments in her name.” 

Farrell is a living, breathing validation of the wisdom of the adage, ‘if you need something done, then ask a busy person. ’ A native of Roscommon, her CV is dense with social entrepreneurship and activism. She has over two decades of experience in the community, voluntary and education sectors, working in a variety of areas including project management, adult education, women’s rights and conflict resolution. 

In two of her current roles as chief executive officer of Longford Women’s Link and as chair of Irish Rural Link, closing the gender pension gap is near the top of her ‘to-do’ list.

She further outlines her concerns: “This something is going to have a massive social impact in the coming years, so the policy makers must be willing to listen to the voices of those on the ground. Whether something will be done about it in the next couple of years, I don’t know; I suppose the devil will be in the details. But there are a lot of national organisations like Irish Rural Link who are pulling that advocacy together and are active in national and indeed European networks.”

The problem won’t be an easy one to solve. A recent report indicated that women, nationally, have pension provision that is 31% less than men and that the gap is unlikely to be closed before 2050. In rural areas, the problem is both starker and deeper.

While few people ever travel from school to pension age on a straight road, for rural women, the roads run a lot more bendy, and some even have some grass growing up the middle. Recent studies have also found that women can struggle more than men with financial literacy and confidence, leading to less proactive retirement planning.

The issues are complex, ingrained and will prove incredibly expensive to untangle. The under-provision is caused by a blend of factors, including lower earnings, unpaid or unrecognised labour on farms, part-time and precarious employment negatively impacting the level of PRSI contributions, no access to occupational pensions and long career breaks necessitated by the relative lack of childcare compared with urban locations.

Tara Farrell, with her colleagues locally and nationally, is focusing primarily on information availability, education on how to access available schemes and on influencing political and social policy. She believes that progress will only come with a bottom-up and a top-down approach to the problem.

“It has to be both,” she explains. “You can have all the informational schemes out there, but if people aren’t aware of their entitlements, then it is of no benefit. It is no good if we get to a Utopian situation and get everything we want, and people don’t access it. For instance, in Longford, there is a high percentage of women who are parenting alone, who are working and caring and are really stretched. 

"We also need to simplify things. We all know that applying for any scheme can be complicated and a little bit inaccessible. We need to say things in plain language. A lot of time, when information is provided about finance and pensions, it can be very dense. It needs to be straightforward and obvious where the entitlements are what is the best way to access them.” 

In the longer term, political leverage could prove to be her closest friend. Voting patterns from recent elections indicate that turnout is higher in rural constituencies than their urban counterparts, and 90% of citizens over sixty say that they vote, twice the rate of those under thirty-five. Farrell is aware of the power that this could bring to her cause.

“We provide political education in local democracy, particularly in rural areas,” continues Farrell. A lot of the work we do is about supporting women to find their voice and getting a sense of how the political machine works and be able to participate in the decisions that impact themselves, their families and their communities.” 

The driving principle of Tara Farrell’s mission is to advocate for policy and bureaucratic fairness so that women living rurally have parity with national outcomes for Irish women.

“And men too,” she says, “but there is a disproportionate impact on women in the caring responsibilities, whether that’s early years care or elder care. I would like to see a strengthening of caring credits, better investment in early years services and then look at that PRSI credit for partners in farms, whether it's a spouse or civil partners. I would call it ‘family services’, like support around parental leave, around carers’ leave, and it is set up in a way that supports women and men, of course. I think we need to see much more targeted campaigns and information out there so that women can know that there are some credits out there and schemes are available.” 

Farrell is frustrated that the quality and availability of broadband have diminished the opportunities offered by the pivot to remote and flexible working norms in the post-pandemic era.

“If you look at all the med tech in Galway who’ve changed to remote working post-Covid, the level of provision of rural broadband is a massive disadvantage to education and employment. Pensions are something that can cause people to switch off when they hear the word, and I think there are great opportunities for organisations like ours and Irish Rural Link to reach out to communities to explain the consequences for a start and also to explain what the situation is, where the information is, particularly in the lead up to auto-enrolment.”