Pensions are really deferred wages, deductions from income from work to pay for a decent income when people retire. After decades of work (and exploitation), workers, male and female, should be entitled to stop and enjoy the last decade or so of life without toil without being poverty.  Literally, they will have earned it.

(...) ignored is the huge disparity in life expectancy between lower income people retiring and very dependent on state pensions and better-off people with additional company pensions. For example, almost eight years separates the life expectancy of retirees living in exclusive parts of London like Kensington and Chelsea to those living in Glasgow. A 60-year old man in the Scottish city might live a further 19 years. For his London contemporary that rises to 27 years.

(...) the pensions deficit in France is tiny compared with the cost of measures introduced in response to the pandemic (€165bn) and the energy shock (around €100bn), as well as President Macron’s commitments to invest more in nuclear power (€50bn) and defence (€100bn by 2030).

“There are enough resources if they are properly organised and fully used. (...) Does a country want to use its resources so that people can stop work at the age of 60 or 65 and have enough income to live on in reasonable comfort, or not? It can be done.”
(...) decent pensions can be provided by cutting out other calls on government revenues i.e. such as bailing out the banks; increased arms spending; more subsidies for private corporations to invest in fossil fuels; and lower taxes for top earners and corporations etc.

As one French sociologist put it: “For 40 years, successive governments have been asking the French people to accept ‘reforms’ reducing social rights. These have degraded public services in health, education, transport and so on, while eroding purchasing power and worsening working conditions … The French are fed up.