Women & Pension Investing

Halifax Share Dealing’s Head of Trading Operations, Phillipa Clarke, talks about the current shift they’re seeing in women planning for retirement.

As a woman who made the decision to have children, I am one of the many who had a period of time where my pension contributions were reduced due to reducing my working hours to spend time with the family. Undoubtedly, this has the potential to leave people behind with their pension contributions, something many women, including myself, may have to make a conscious effort to redress at a later stage.

Post-natal leave is now more balanced which has been a positive change, and from what we’re seeing – more women are starting to take control of their pension investing too.

We’re seeing an increase in women investors in general at Halifax Share Dealing, slowly and steadily there is a change in the right direction.

More interestingly we’ve seen a greater shift towards applications for Self-Invested Personal Pensions (SIPPs). With SIPPs being able to be used to supplement an existing pension or as a main pension, it seems that women are looking to strengthen and control their pension investing. We saw a steady 28%-30% of our SIPP applications being made by women during 2018, 2019 and 2020 but so far in 2021 we’ve seen 37%, which suggests a growing engagement amongst women with retirement planning.

This is an encouraging sign, we have the tools in place to make DIY pension investing straight-forward, including a new Select list of funds which highlights top fund picks from an independent investment research company. We hope this makes choosing investments easier for anyone setting up their own SIPP. We were also delighted to receive a ‘Low Cost Pension’ award in the Boring Money Best Buy 2021 Awards for our SIPP. More information about the Halifax SIPP can be found here