Despite automatic enrolment in work-pension schemes, private saving for pensions in the UK is low with most people being relatively under-pensioned in later life and reliant on the state pension. There is also a clear gender gap in the way that pension saving happens, with women living longer and saving much less for old age than men.


In this incisive book, Hayley James seeks to challenge the hetero-patriarchal assumptions in pension systems. She demonstrates the ways in which pension saving, as an everyday practice of finance, is shaped by gender and how this evolves over the lifecourse. She examines the ways in which pension systems are not gender-neutral, since they assume behaviours which marginalize the lived experiences of gender, and argues that, to resolve gendered inequalities in pensions, we need to change systems to suit the realities of lived experience.