According to a government report, the pension reform will make women work an additional seven months, compared to five months for men.
Will mothers suffer from the entry into force of the pension reform? While the text is still being debated in the National Assembly, Friday, February 10, this reproach comes up very regularly in the arguments of its many opponents. “This reform is two years firm for everyone, and it’s even worse for women” thus hammers Béatrice Clicq, confederal secretary of the Force Ouvrière union, when the CGT denounces on its site a project “anti-women”.
According to a government report (PDF document), the pension reform will indeed make women work seven additional months, compared to five months for men. This defect of the reform, recognized by the executive, emanates from the flagship measure of the project: the decline in the start of the retirement age from 62 to 64 years. It will have direct consequences on the usefulness of the increase in the duration of insurance, a device which grants up to eight additional quarters of pension insurance to women who have had children. Franceinfo comes back in four questions on the functioning of this mechanism, and on the implications of the pension reform on it.
1 How does the increase in duration of insurance work for employees in the private sector?
By allocating additional quarters of insurance to the parents, the increase in the duration of insurance aims to compensate for the consequences of the arrival of a baby on professional careers. As explained on the service-public.fr site, employees in the general scheme thus benefit from eight additional quarters for the birth of a child. For any child born or adopted before 2010, the mother automatically obtains eight trimesters: half for maternity or adoption, and the other half for education. Since 2010, both parents can share the four quarters granted for adoption and education.
In addition to these additional quarters, parents of large families can obtain an increase in their pension. If you have had at least three children, and raised them for at least 9 years, before they turned 16, the amount of your pension will be increased by 10%. And if you benefit from a premium, “this increase [sera] calculated on the pension already increased by the premium“, explains the site of the service public.fr. For the self-employed, rules similar to those of the private sector apply, explains the site of the Center for European and International Social Security Liaisons.
2 What is the situation in the public sector?
Public service employees are less favored by the system of increased insurance duration, specifies the site vie-publique.fr. For children born or adopted before 1 January 2004, civil servants benefit from a bonus in the duration of insurance of only four quarters per child, on condition that they have interrupted or reduced their activity for at least two months at the time of the arrival of the child. With regard to children born or adopted after 1 January 2004, an increase in the insurance period of two quarters is granted to female civil servants.
As in the private sector, having at least three children makes it possible to obtain a 10% increase in the retirement pension under certain conditions. Beyond the third child, civil servants can also benefit from an additional 5% increase per child, adds service-public.fr.
3 What would be the consequences of postponing the legal age on this mechanism?
At present, the system of increasing the duration of insurance allows mothers to obtain a better rate – and therefore a higher pension – when they retire at the legal age of 62 years. But if the postponement from 62 to 64 of this legal age of departure came into force, as provided for in the reform, the usefulness of this mechanism would be greatly limited, warns the economist Michaël Zemmour, lecturer at the University Panthéon -Sorbonne, interviewed by franceinfo.
“A mother who, thanks to these quarters, could benefit from a full-rate departure at 62 will now have to leave at 64.”
Michaël Zemmour, lecturer at Panthéon-Sorbonne Universityat franceinfo
On the executive side, it is recognized that women may be disadvantaged by this measure. “Obviously, if you postpone the legal age, they are somewhat penalized. We absolutely do not disagree“, declared Franck Riester, guest of Public Senate on January 23. The Minister in charge of Relations with Parliament added, however, that measures of the text, such as the revalorization of some of the smallest pensions or the maintenance at 67 of the age of cancellation of the discount, could benefit women.
4 Will the pension reform directly modify the increase in the duration of insurance?
For the time being, mothers will continue to benefit from additional trimesters, up to a maximum of eight per child. According to information from franceinfo, the executive would consider increasing the ceiling for these eight quarters. He would also have drawn up the observation of the imbalance between the private and the public, the civil servants benefiting from fewer quarters than the employees of the private sector. For the moment, the idea of an increase in survivor’s pensions (which allow a widowed insured to benefit from part of his spouse’s pension) is preferred to that of new free quarters.
In order to address these issues, a mission on family rights was entrusted by the executive to the Pensions Orientation Council. Proposals in this area could thus be included in the Social Security financing bill of 2024.