Why the WASPI has no Sting: Gender, Generation and Pension Inequalities

Since 2015, Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) has campaigned tirelessly for ‘justice’ for the millions of 1950s-born women adversely affected by the raising and equalisation of the state pension age (SPA). Yet, to date, no compensation has been paid.

The group's grievances concern the way previous governments approached the task of equalising and raising the age at which the state pension can be claimed, originally set in 1948 at 60 for women and 65 for men. Equalisation was planned to progress in stages between 2010 and 2020, but this timetable was accelerated in 2011 by the coalition government. WASPI's complaint is that these changes have been implemented unfairly, with the women most directly affected—born between April 1950 and March 1960—not informed of their delayed pensions in a timely way. WASPI argues that, consequently, many women have faced financial hardship, and have recently called for compensation for the approximately 3.6 million affected women.

At the 2019 general election, SPA compensation featured in the manifestos of Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the Brexit Party, with Jeremy Corbyn pledging to settle the ‘moral debt’ through pay-outs of up to £31,000. Despite this, the present Labour government did not renew its promise at the 2024 election and confirmed in December that no compensation would be paid, citing excessive costs to the taxpayer. But pressures on public spending provide only part of the answer. Despite Corbyn's pledge, Labour's vote fell amongst older women, suggesting that WASPI compensation did not carry high electoral salience for these voters. It is in this context that it is asked: why does the WASPI have no sting?

Bridging the gap

Recent quantitative analysis of the impact of the SPA reforms, combined with new qualitative evidence from the Mass Observation (MO) life-writing archive, offers an alternative perspective on WASPI’s efforts to mobilise 1950s-born women.

Amongst women in their early sixties, economists found paid employment to have increased by 10 per cent and benefits claims by 7 per cent, partly offsetting the loss of state pension income. Among this group, the average weekly shortfall following the SPA changes stood at £50. As WASPI warned, this tipped some women into poverty, rates of which rose from 15 per cent to 21 per cent.

Yet studies found little evidence of a general rise in material deprivation. Economists additionally noted that the increased risk of poverty appeared to be temporary, with rates falling back once women passed SPA. This suggested that most women were finding ways to smooth their consumption as they awaited their pensions.

The qualitative evidence of MO, drawn from forty-seven testimonies submitted by women belonging to the WASPI age cohort, contributes to a picture of relative financial security for the majority of WASPI women and a more precarious situation for a sizable minority. The former were typically married and could draw on joint household resources, whilst the latter were far likelier to be single or divorced. It is notable that those observers who engaged most actively with the WASPI campaign were not poor. Yet they alone in the sample had taken concrete action to support WASPI's demands. Why?

Lucky boomers

Material situations matter in politics, but so do subjective understandings of those situations.

The MO reflections testify to the situated and dynamic nature of attitudes towards work, money and ageing, presenting challenges for single-issue movements like WASPI. The campaign's rhetoric encourages supporters to identify with a particular age cohort who have been unfairly treated by government over SPA reform. Yet, for many MO writers, reflecting upon their lives in generational terms produced more complex stories which map uneasily onto the WASPI narrative of injustice.

Across the wider sample, writers made sense of their financial circumstances in a variety of ways, some advancing horizontal analyses of intragenerational inequalities—including the category of marital status—instead of, or alongside, vertical analyses of intergenerational differences. In a few cases, ‘luck’ was entirely individualised by writers, who explained their good fortune in terms of an unexpected inheritance or a late marriage to a wealthy man.

What this suggests is that the WASPI appeal to pensions ‘injustice’ and ‘inequality’ was never likely to rally a mass movement. Life for most women born in the 1950s is both less precarious and more complicated than the campaign allows.

Beyond WASPI

Considering this analysis, the current government's position on WASPI compensation appears defensible. Yet this fact is umbilically linked to another about older women's standard of living: its reliance on male spousal income and private pension wealth derived from employment in labour markets which have systematically rewarded men's work more highly than women's. In other words, the financial pain inflicted on women by SPA equalisation has, paradoxically, been eased by the persistence of a deeper gender inequality.

Arguably, as the present postwar cohorts continue to age, health and social care will loom ever larger in their political priorities. These are the issues which truly define the collective self-interest of WASPI women, now entering their late sixties and early seventies in an era of austerity. Here, even the luckiest boomers feel vulnerable.

With further SPA rises planned and cost-of-living inflation making it impossible for many gen X-ers and millennials to save for retirement, it might be expected that there will be more—rather than less—activism of this kind in coming decades. That is unless new intragenerational differences—for example, between those who can expect to inherit and those who cannot—override.