Altersarmut: Why the money will not be enough later
Charlotte was the first to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. The guests crowded in the Kreuzberg hookah bar. The scent of cherry flavor hung in the air. Waiters loaded low tables with stuffed grape leaves, lamb skewers, dripping baklava. Half dazed by the heavy red wine, we soon lay casually on the canapes. Friends from all eras, once assembled to the group picture. Charlotte in her purple dress, her blond hair tucked up, made a speech and thanked her sons. Since her divorce, the journalist lives with them alone. Now they are young men, one studying, the other learning a cook. "You are the luck of my life," said Charlotte. Then the voice of the Turkish pop diva Sertab Erener began. "Hey, Mister DJ," after the song by Madonna. A pack of women stormed onto the dance floor. Gloria Gaynor's "I want to survive" was not lacking, nor was it "more than a woman" of the Bee Gees: the soundtrack of our lives.
We turn 50 and move from one party to the next. Invitations come as direct mailings into the house. We celebrate. There are many reasons to be missed, but it is also time for a sober assessment.
We are many. We are suspected by the younger ones because we are supposed to clog everything. The job market, the ICE. In 1964, 1.36 million babies were born in Germany. For about ten years, between 1958 and 1968, until the Pillenknick, the Germans got children like crazy. 40 students in one class, crowded lecture theaters, lots of competition. The boys were predicted an existence as a taxi driver with a university degree, if they did not study business administration or electrical engineering.
We did not want to be our mothers
We girls were not prophesied. All we knew was that we wanted to live differently than our mothers, who were almost all housewife. Under their "frustration", at that time a buzzword, we suffered at home, even under their secretive envy of us. We saw her cracked self-confidence, we saw through her marriage facades. Without a man, a woman in the West German maternal generation hardly existed. We feared nothing more than such dependence, that drove us: We girls of the 70s were ambitious, hungry for books, for knowledge, for the world. Forty years later, many of us find ourselves in exactly the same situation that we always wanted to avoid.
"I can not divorce," said Gabriele on one of the many birthday parties, outside, the smokers. Gabriele had come alone, her husband, an architect, was once again on his construction site in Dubai. Her marriage has been loveless for years, but since the law was changed, Gabriele can not assume she'll be able to keep up after a divorce. In recent years, she worked only part-time, as an archivist in another architectural firm. She also studied architecture, yes, but because of the children she has withdrawn, they should be able to do grammar school, and if there is no one at home in the afternoon ... The women who listened to her nodded knowingly. A taboo was broken. We talked about money, not about men and certainly not about age spots - trivialities in comparison to what the age really threatens to keep ready for us.
We are not humbled by wrinkles, we are humbled by the "Pension Notice". What is in there, some of us would prefer not to know. Charlotte, for example, confessed that she leaves the annual letter with the sender "Deutsche Rentenversicherung" unopened. With pointed fingers she throws him in the box with the tax documents, which is stowed away in a storage room: "This is Feng Shui."
Because of that, said Eva, the bravest. It just makes it worse, I know what I'm getting, 850 Euros. " No one said a word. Suddenly Charlotte confessed: "My pension is only in the three-digit range, I have to ask if that's not a mistake, after all, we had the supply balance." - "But Markus did not really make a good profit until she got divorced - in your time he was just a medical assistant - and you let the best jobs go for him," said Eva.
Versorgungsausgleich. Since the pension of one is compared with the pension of the other. And the pension points earned during marriage are shared in half. By the way, sometimes it's women who have to give something away. Like Susanne, a translator who has been quiet so far. Her ex-husband, she said, earned more during her marriage as a self-employed person than she did, but she did not pay into the state pension scheme. As a "compensation" they must therefore later 30 euros from their already non-existent pension to their ex-husband.
We murmur: "But you should make private provision, absolutely!" Eva did that.Recently, however, her financial services provider, who had sold her life insurance more than a decade ago, came forward. He wrote of "turbulent times on the financial markets" and of "heavily indebted states that change our environment". All this affects their "asset accumulation". In plain language: Maybe there will be nothing left soon. Now he advises on "investment in real estate".
What is it for, please? What a bad mood theme! The celebration seemed over. Or should we rather get drunk quickly with the expensive Primitivo? Charlotte had already decided. "This is really too much reality for me!", She called and left. Gabriele calmed down a bit. With Eva, she overturned the value of the house, which she will inherit from her parents, at least she hopes that. Maybe the seventies-bungalow in Oldenburg would go for a nursing home, at least she would not be able to pay for it.
And what about us when we are old? Eva suggested renting a large old apartment in Görlitz together. Everything would be empty, in this beautiful city in Lusatia.
"We could start a WG," she said. "Of course with separate bathrooms."
Housing projects in old age - the topic is socially acceptable, so you will not be unpleasant. Talking about female old-age poverty already. We also replace as much as possible. We do not want to see each other as poor old women, and certainly we do not want to be seen like that. After all, we are at the zenith, or has the word "best agger" been invented just to sell us expensive products?
Are in fact meant even our mothers, most of whom, at least in the West, are materially good - if they have stayed or remarried? Never again will there be so many well-off old women who have barely done paid work compared to their daughters. Their wealth hides the poverty of future pensioners.
Equality ends with money
Equality ends with money. We are far from being as self-sufficient as we believe. Many women of our generation are financially dependent, at the latest in old age. If there is no life partner with a good pension, we will be demoted to social welfare and have to apply for basic security.
Then it will be checked if we are in need. This is the truth about the supposedly emancipated baby boomers. Charlotte, Gabriele, Susanne and Eva are not isolated cases. More than 40 percent of women born between 1962 and 1966 in the old federal states have to expect a statutory pension of less than 600 euros a month. Of the same-age women who grew up in the GDR, this affects 20 percent. Hardly anyone talks about it in talk shows. They are idle about the eternal question of reconciling work and family life.
When we had children, there was nothing in the old German states that earned the name childcare. The price of this shortage is paid by the women in the end. So it's high time to give the numbers, as the social scientist Barbara Riedmüller, a professor at the Free University of Berlin, did in 2012. She has examined the CVs of middle-aged women and shows that female old-age poverty is damned logical in a pension system that only supplies the "Eckrentner", who has earned at least an average of 45 years uninterruptedly. This is almost always a man.
The bottom line is nothing
Half the women of our generation work part-time. And not enough. Mini jobs are served to 60 percent by women. In the low paid sector as many as 70 percent of the employees are female.
These jobs are the miserable counterpart in a construct that is still standard in Germany: the togetherness marriage, generously sponsored by the state through spouse splitting, rewarding unequal income with tax rebate. There are other pension models. In Switzerland, for example, everyone gets a citizen's pension, nobody is dependent on alms in old age. In the Netherlands part-time work is upgraded by the state paying part of the social security contributions. In Austria, 93 percent of the population pay into state pension insurance - unlike in Germany also civil servants. Now an approximation of the "mother's pension" is promised. 28 euros additional per month for each child born before 1992. In the new federal states only 26 euros. A consolation - apart from the fact that most women of our vintages have their children later. By the way, if a retiree receives basic security, the mother's pension will be deducted, so that nothing remains of it. The tee-off pension with 63, also decided in the latest pension package, favors almost exclusively men.
Does not anyone see that double standards are being used? Or does not Andrea Nahles, the new social minister, want to see it? What women lose when they mainly care for others can be calculated exactly: Already one year of education reduces wages by an average of 16 percent compared to the income of a woman who works without a break.
Even more dramatic are the wage losses, which accumulate over a longer period: 83 000 €, is so high the gap after 15 years, when a woman with 30 has a child and then works three years part-time. And another figure illustrates how much mothers are discriminated against in the labor market: even 15 years after the birth of a child and in continuous full-time employment, women with children do not reach the hourly wage of a correspondingly working 46-year-old woman without children.
Christina Boll, research director at the Hamburg Institute of International Economics, found out as early as 2010. However, many of the women who have renounced children do not reach the same positions as men. In addition, they are often paid significantly lower for the same job.
The "gender pay gap", the wage gap between men and women, is one of the largest in the OECD countries at 22 percent in Germany. Within Europe, only Estonia and Austria are even worse off. The gap between wages does not arise because women study art history and men study electrical engineering. It is especially large between physicists and physicists.
Men of our generation receive more than twice as high a pension in Germany as women of the same age. Is that fair? In none of the 34 OECD countries is this difference as high as in Germany. This was the result of an OECD study on gender equality in 2012.
An "employment-centered" pension model, as it is known in the jargon, puts women at a disadvantage, which still leads to an often exhausting patchwork life between work and family in Germany. We did not just do it voluntarily. The overly simple ideology of choice ignores the simple fact that no one lives in a neutral space. We do not make our own conditions. And we did not choose our husbands according to the selection principle "provider or loser", as a journalist once maliciously claimed.
We loved great men, did great things with great men and still do. But that does not change the fact that many men do not like it when women claim the same jobs as they do. With the same merit, the same possibilities of influence. Many men of our generation also do not like it so much, when they are allowed to let off steam with children not only as a fun father, but also to share with us the lowlands of parents evenings and Sockensortieren. Only 7.2 percent of men between the ages of 40 and 49 live "consistently equal", social scientist Carsten Wippermann found out in the spring of 2013. For men between the ages of 50 and 59, there are even fewer: 6.1 percent. Despite skepticism about statistics, they give possible answers to the question of why our marriages and relationships have been severely damaged. It is not our fault alone.
There is still time to do something
We are not old yet, we have plans for something else. Work, love, existence for others, even that. The omnipresent litanies about the aging of our bodies do not help us any further. The impositions are different. Laws that we did not do. Expectations that are brought to us. Anyone who understands these relationships is less afraid of the future, feels less powerless.
It is time to tackle the impositions. For example, by not moving unpleasant facts like future pensions away from us. We have experienced a lot and done a lot. We have to insist that this pension changes a little, that our experience and competence in the job market will not be spoiled. There are now companies that are rethinking. But we also have to rethink. Celebrating ourselves is a good start.
More on the subject: "The betrayed generation, what we expect the women in the middle of the world" is the title of the new book by Christina Bylow and Kristina Vaillant (256 pages, 16.99 euros, Pattloch-Verlag)
The women of the baby boomer generation
In Germany live about 6.5 million women born between 1958 and 1968. Job: Eight out of ten women between the ages of 45 and 55 are in employment. The part-time trap: More than half of women at this age work part-time, and the trend has intensified since 2000. More than three quarters of all working mothers with children under the age of 16 work part-time. Mini Jobs: More than 60 percent of mini-jobbers are women. In the group of 40- to 50-year-old women, it is even 70 percent, and their share is rising. Re-entry: Only 13 percent of women return to work after a long family phase. The pensions: More than 40 percent of women born between 1962 and 1966 in the old federal states have to expect a statutory pension of less than 600 euros a month. Family and children: After 14 years at the latest, in 85 percent of the marriages the model "sole earner with wife" or "breadwinner with additional earner" prevailed. Single parent: Nine out of ten of the 2.7 million lone parents are women. About two-thirds of them are between 35 and 54 years old.They are much worse off than married married couples with or without a child.
