Sec. 2. Findings

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Congress finds the following: Approximately 29 percent of households headed by individuals aged 55 through 74 have no defined benefit plan or retirement savings, according to 2016 data from the Survey of Consumer Finances. Just over one-third of the private sector workforce does not have access to a retirement plan at the workplace, and only half of the workforce actually participates in a retirement plan. Women’s retirement preparedness often lags significantly behind their male counterparts', resulting in the median retirement income for women in 2016 being just 58 percent of men’s retirement income.

Women are 1.5 times 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. Because of the pay gap, women working full-time, year-round typically lose $403,440 over a 40-year career thereby requiring the average woman to work almost a decade longer than her male counterpart to make up that career wage gap.

Due to the lower lifetime wages stemming from unequal pay and caregiving duties, the average Social Security benefit for a woman age 65 or older is $14,044 a year, while men of the same age receive $18,173 a year, on average. 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.

Every year, more than 1,200,000 couples get divorced in the United States. After the family home, retirement savings tends to be the largest asset to be divided in a divorce. While fees and expenses associated with retirement plans have been in decline, participants have seen direct charges for processing qualified domestic relations orders increase significantly.