Early Retirement Age for Women as a Mechanism for Compensating De Facto Inequality
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60131/jlaw.1.2026.11874Keywords:
Retirement pension, retirement or pensionable age, de facto equality, temporary special measures, the rights of older women, gender pay gap, unpaid work.Abstract
The equal realization of the abilities and opportunities of women and men remains a challenge not only in Georgia but also in countries with developed democracies. Obstructive circumstances arbitrarily erected within the social and cultural microclimate, hinder the translation of de jure, that is, formal legal equality, into de facto, that is, real and substantive equality between the sexes. When, due to the prevailing social environment in a country, the legal and factual realities concerning equality between women and men are not synchronized, it becomes necessary to introduce, on a temporary basis, differential treatment on the grounds of sex through incentive-based interventions. It is precisely the socio-economic inequality experienced by women that stimulates the establishment of a differentiated retirement age. The difference in retirement age between women and men has historical, social, cultural, and economic origins and, through dynamic and evolutionary development, has gradually moved toward equalization. The article examines the compatibility of the differentiated retirement age established for women and men with the right to equality, the preconditions that justify the introduction of such differentiation, the parameters used at the European level to assess it, and whether there exists a pressing social need in Georgia to maintain different retirement ages based on sex.
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