In terms of answering that question, I would focus on three sets of characteristics that I think have implications. The first set of characteristics is what's happening with the labour market and demographic characteristics of women who are now in their thirties, forties and fifties, and coming up on retirement. What are the key trends we're seeing there? Again, I think, on the positive side, we're seeing high and sustained rates of labour force participation and, as a result of that—and acknowledging the fact of years out of the workforce—higher lifetime earnings than any preceding cohort.
The second factor that I would point to there is the tremendous increase in educational attainment among women in their thirties, forties and fifties. If we look at workers aged 45 to 59, even at the beginning of the 1990s—men included here—the proportion who had high school or even less than high school was quite substantial. I don't have the number off the top of my head, but it was in the range of probably 40% to 50%. The proportion with a university degree was quite small. That has been fundamentally reversed over the last 20 years. To the extent that things such as earnings and pension coverage are correlated with earnings, that would certainly have a positive impact.
On the negative side around the demographic and the labour markets, I think the incidence of later-life divorce is something that we hadn't seen before, and that would be another implication. So there are those types of trends in the demographics on the labour market side, plus the fact that they're having fewer children than used to be the case.
That's all fine and well, but the next set of characteristics is what's happening within the workplace. Here we have trends in pension coverage, the characteristics of pension plans. In the United States and the U.K., from what I read in the literature, the shift towards defined contribution plans has surpassed what we've seen in Canada. If we were to move in that direction of greater prevalence of group RRSPs, that would reshape the financial preparations that people would be making and the vehicles they would have to make those financial preparations, regardless of their education and these factors.
The third one I would point to is what's happening in financial markets in terms of rates of return on these things—I'm not in a position to speculate on that—and also in terms of whether people are in institutional savings arrangements like defined benefit plans or in individualized retirement accounts, which raises issues such as management expense ratios and things like that that people at the C.D. Howe Institute and others have pointed to.
So I think those three sets of characteristics—the demographic and labour market, what's happening within workplaces, and what's happening in the financial markets—all come to bear.