A/HRC/26/39 each parent individually and two months that can be allocated according to parental choice.15 96. Need for care continues for toddlers and older children after the period of parental leave and also exists for the elderly and disabled. Responsibility for this needs to be redistributed through care services. At present, international minimum state obligations for provision of childcare services or for elderly and disabled services are lacking. 97. As regards childcare, the Working Group supports the call of UN-Women for States to guarantee quality and accessible childcare as a social protection floor. This both serves the obligation to achieve de facto equality for women in economic and social life and enables parents to reconcile work and family life. The Working Group suggests that the provision of childcare may also be engineered as an economic efficiency measure, with the right to fully subsidized care services linked to the parent’s participation in economic activity. In addition, good practice includes State support for community, trade union and corporate initiatives to provide care services. Furthermore, after children start school, it is good practice to synchronize children’s school hours and holidays with adults’ work schedules. C. Older women16 98. Women’s poverty and quality of life in older age derives from the culmination of the earlier phases in their life cycle and bears their imprint: stereotyping in education and girlhood; precarious jobs; informal labour; the costs of caring; interrupted career patterns; and the motherhood penalty in labour force participation. Hence women’s situation in retirement can be regarded as a litmus test for the quality of women’s economic and social life. 99. There is a gender pension gap both in wealth accumulation and income. The balance of pension entitlements within multipillar systems has a direct impact on the gender pension gap. Social (World Bank “zero pillar”) schemes, which give basic flat rate citizens’ pensions, are non-contributory and do not, as such, differentiate between men’s and women’s pension entitlement, thus producing equality. Therefore, the trend to diversify pension systems to include contributory first and second pillar systems, which base a substantial element of pension entitlement on working life contributions, impacts women adversely, increasing the gender pension gap, as women’s contribution to these funded pension schemes is lower because of the structural factors in their labour market and care work. 100. Discriminatory laws and practice prevail in most countries. Some such laws are selfevident, such as mandatory early retirement for women. Some are what has been called “statistical discrimination”, such as separate annuity tables for women and men based on women’s greater longevity. Others are the result of the sociology of the family and of legislative policy endorsing and perpetuating the economic dependence of women on a husband’s income and pension entitlement. 101. Good practices include gender-specific compensatory measures such as continuing pension contributions during maternity and childcare leaves, unisex calculation of benefits, equalizing mandatory retirement age and mandatory joint annuities. All these measures, with quite wide margins of difference in the extent of their generosity and with some 15 16 See A/HRC/26/39/Add.1. This section draws upon the background paper by Frances Raday. See also Estelle James et al., “The gender impact of pension reform – a cross-country analysis”, Policy Research Working Paper (World Bank, 2003). 19