Pension sharing between spouses. How does the public respond to the idea?

Abstract

In Norway, as in many other countries, women consistently receive lower pensions than men. The Norwegian pension system contains several redistributive elements that mitigate this gender gap, such as pension credits for childcare and a provision for inheriting pension rights from a deceased spouse, but these elements involve financial subsidization of couples with a traditional division of labour. An alternative approach to reduce the gender gap in pensions that has been discussed in Norway and is applied in different variations in other countries, is to introduce a form of sharing pension rights between spouses. The pension reform may have made such a measure more relevant, but there is little knowledge about the potential popular legitimacy of such measures. Based on a survey from 2017 (N=3,080), we find that arguments in favour of as well as against such schemes receive support in the population, but people’s responses are sensitive to question wording and context. Support is substantially stronger among women than men and stronger among married than among cohabiting and single people. Women in couples with a traditional division of labour are more positive than women in gender-equal couples, while the opposite pattern applies to men. Support is stronger among the highly educated, while we find no systematic differences across age groups. The pattern of support cuts across both the left-right divide and traditional gender political cleavages.