European Retirement Week: Wake up to the pension challenge — Spotlight on the pension gender gap

A stimulating short exchange between Mary Collins, senior policy & advocacy coordinator at the European Women's Lobby, and Mariya Mincheva, vice-president of the Bulgarian Industrial Association, on the role of financial literacy in reducing the pension gender gap. The discussion is moderated by Insurance Europe's Nicolas Jeanmart. Our webinar also features a special guest: Professor Vera Hoorens from KU Leuven. This one hour webinar starts at 8h45 CET.

Programme

8h45

Presentation by Professor Vera Hoorens, KU Leuven, Belgium

9h00

Debate

Mary Collins
Senior Policy & Advocacy Coordinator
European Women’s Lobby

Mariya Mincheva
Vice-president
Bulgarian Industrial Association (BIA)

Moderator: Nicolas Jeanmart
Head of personal and general insurance
Insurance Europe

Speakers

Mary Collins is Senior Policy and Advocacy Coordinator at the European Women’s Lobby, where she has been working for a number of years. She works mainly on socio-economic issues relating to women’s economic independence, including the gender pay, pension, poverty gaps, work-life-balance and EU economic governance issues. She also coordinates the European Women's Lobby Feminist Economics working group, which published the Purple Pact for a feminist economic model.

Vera Hoorens is a full professor of social psychology at KU Leuven. Before moving to Leuven, she taught at the University of Groningen and the University of Tilburg, both in the Netherlands, and was a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford University in the UK. She has also been a guest professor at the University of Savoie, Chambéry, France. She holds doctoral degrees in psychology and in history.

Hoorens is mainly interested in risk perception and risk communication, social inequality (which is sometimes based on stereotypes and prejudice) and communication about inequality, and implicit meanings in verbal communication more generally. Her contribution to the MIGAPE project, from which she will present some results, mainly involves an analysis of hitherto understudied psychological factors that might contribute to the gender pension gap and approaches to address them.

Mariya Mincheva has worked for the Bulgarian Industrial Association (BIA) since 2006, becoming director of legal affairs in 2018 and vice-president in 2020.

She is responsible for the association’s activities in relation to the protection of employers’ interests, the promotion of entrepreneurship and foreign economic cooperation and she participates in the work of the National Council for Tripartite Cooperation.

She also coordinates the BIA’s participation in international organisations such as BusinessEurope, the International Organisation of Employers and the International Labour Organization and is in charge of communication with the European Parliament and EC Representation in Bulgaria. Mincheva is currently a member of the employers’ group of the European Economic and Social Committee.

Nicolas Jeanmart is head of Insurance Europe’s personal insurance, general insurance and macroeconomics department. Prior to joining Insurance Europe in 2010, he worked for the European Savings Banks Group, where he held various positions, culminating in four years as head of the banking supervision and economic affairs department. In his earlier career, he provided consultancy and training services, primarily to the financial sector.

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