'Mind the Gap': Gender Inequalities in China's Pension System

This thesis analyses the gender gap in China’s most prominent pension schemes: the Urban Employees’ Pension Scheme (UEPS) and the New Rural Social Pension Programme (NRSPP). The author created two new datasets for the two pension schemes from data already available in the ‘China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study’. Specifically, descriptive data analysis was used to explore how large gender gaps exist in pension benefit for the UEPS and participation rates for the NRSPP. Inferential data analysis was applied to explore how impact factors on the gender pension gap change over time. In the case of the UEPS, the thesis groups empirical data based on the years of retirement to examine how the gender gap, in terms of pension benefit, develops depending on important pension reforms. Additionally, the research explores which impact factors have affected the participation rates for men and women respectively in the NRSPP. The findings of the study are fourfold: first, the gender gap both in terms of pension benefit in the UEPS and participation rates in the NRSPP does exist and has become larger over time. Second, in the UEPS, after reflecting the results with pension policies in different time periods, it is concluded that the variables which are directly included in the pension calculation form are the most crucial impact factors, such as eligible working experience and wages. This finding refutes the statement that ‘gender difference in retirement age is the most crucial factor to eliminate the gender pension gap’ in most of the previous empirical studies. The thesis also analyses results for the different retirement time periods and ranks them according to the significance of their impact on the gender pension gap in the UEPS. Eligible working experience always ranks the first in all retirement groups, and wages is the other factor that always ranks the top position in all groups. Third, in the NRSPP, the effect of some selected impact factors can be exactly opposite for men and women, which suggests the conclusions of previous empirical studies may be inaccurate, since they only consider gender variable in regression models, rather than exploring the impact factors’ effect on the participation rates for men and women respectively. The findings suggest that income-related variables and education level play an important role in explaining participation rates in the NRSPP for both genders. Finally, the results of this thesis reject Esping-Andersen’s (1990, 1999) argument that the ‘commodification’ of women could be crucial to reduce gender pension gap. In practice, the ‘commodification’ of women to increase the female labour participation rate is not sufficient to close the gender gap in China’s pension system. Traditional practices and traditional gender role expectations play important roles, in which equalization of educational opportunities, equal opportunities for high-paying jobs and promotions in the labour market, and reducing women's care responsibilities are crucial steps in closing the gender gap in China's pension system.