Sec. 1. Short title; findings

228 words·~1 min read·/bill/114/hr/4235/ih/section-1

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This Act may be cited as the . Women's Pension Protection Act of 2015 Congress finds the following: Approximately 45.9 percent of private sector workers do not participate in a workplace retirement savings program and, of those who do not participate, 84 percent have reported that they do not have access to a workplace retirement program, according to a September 2015 report on retirement coverage by the Government Accountability Office. Women’s retirement preparedness often lags significantly behind their male counterparts, resulting in the median retirement income for women in 2010 being just 59 percent of men’s retirement income.

Women are almost twice as likely as men to live in poverty after age 65. Women make up 2/3 of low-wage workers, even though they comprise less than half of all workers, and low-wage workers are less likely than other workers to participate in a retirement plan at work. The cost impact on women who leave the workforce early to become caregivers, in terms of lost wages and Social Security benefits, equals $324,044 in lost retirement savings. Just 1 in 5 part-time workers who work a full year are eligible for a retirement plan, and women are almost twice as likely to work part-time as men.

While traditional defined benefit retirement plans have spousal protections, defined contribution retirement plans, which have become increasingly common, currently provide no similar spousal protections.