Janina Bechtold

Research Topic

Pensions, old-age poverty and gender, 1975 and 2006

I completed my undergraduate in History and Poltics at the University of Heidelberg and my MPhil in Economic and Social History at Cambridge before continuing on to become a Dphil candidate at Oxford. Supervised by Prof Ben Jackson and Lyndsey Jenkins, my current research examines pensions reforms in the UK throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. I consider how different ideas and ideologies influenced and shaped welfare and pension policies and how these dealt and accounted for the fact that women are and have been more likely to be poor in retirement than men. I am also interested in understanding what extent and in what way ideas and policies were inflected by gender. Recognising that female old-age poverty is influenced by both pre-retirement factors – such as disrupted employment histories and caregiving responsibilities – and retirement-related factors, including longevity, pension age, and state-private pension arrangements, my research examines these elements in depth. 

Supervisor: Ben Jackson and Lyndsey Jenkins

Conference/Seminar Participation

• 'Occupational Pensions and the Question of Equality', Women, Work and Wages in the long 1970s, University of Oxford (12 September 2025).
• ‘Pensions, Poverty, and Policy: Gendered Inequalities in Old Age, 1975–2005’, Modern British History Seminar, University of Oxford (08 May 2025).