How plan design and modern delivery models make a difference
March is Women’s History Month—a time to recognize the progress women have made across the workforce and economy. It is also a timely reminder of a persistent financial challenge: women remain less prepared for retirement than men. While the causes are complex, a growing body of evidence suggests that retirement outcomes are shaped not only by individual savings decisions, but by the structure and delivery of employer-sponsored retirement plans.
(Source: Transamerica Institute)
Defined contribution (DC) plans are now the primary retirement vehicle for private-sector workers, making plan design and governance critical to long-term outcomes. These decisions can have an outsized impact on women, whose careers are more likely to include periods of part-time work, caregiving, or workforce interruption.
Importantly, these outcomes are influenced not only by plan design decisions, but also by the framework through which retirement plans are delivered and governed. Increasingly, employers are exploring alternative plan delivery models that can help reduce governance complexity while supporting more effective plan design. Pooled Employer Plans (PEPs), introduced under the SECURE Act, represent one example of how retirement plan delivery models are evolving. By allowing multiple unrelated employers to participate in a single retirement plan structure, PEPs can help enable broader and more consistent access to plan design features associated with improved retirement outcomes.
Women’s retirement readiness is influenced by a range of structural factors that shape earnings patterns, contribution opportunities, and retirement timing. Compared to men, women are more likely to experience:
In addition, women tend to invest more conservatively in their DC accounts, often holding lower allocations to growth-oriented assets. While this approach may reduce short-term volatility, it can also limit long-term portfolio growth and reduce the potential benefits of compounding over time.
(Source: Transamerica Institute)
These factors can lead to fewer years of contributions, lower cumulative savings, and a greater reliance on employer-provided retirement programs to build sufficient retirement income. As a result, the design and effectiveness of employer-sponsored retirement plans can have a disproportionate impact on retirement outcomes for women.
Importantly, this suggests that improving retirement readiness is not solely a matter of increasing individual engagement, but also of ensuring that plan structures are designed to support consistent and effective savings across a wide range of workforce patterns.
Certain plan design features have been shown to improve participation, contribution levels, and long-term savings outcomes across employee populations. These features can be particularly beneficial for employees whose careers may include periods of lower earnings or intermittent workforce participation.
Key design elements include:
Access to institutional investment structures and lifetime income solutions. These features can help improve long-term investment outcomes and provide greater retirement income certainty, particularly important given women’s longer life expectancies.
Collectively, these plan design features can help create a more resilient retirement savings framework that supports consistent accumulation across diverse career paths.
Automatic enrollment and automatic escalation. These features help ensure that employees begin saving early and continue increasing contributions over time, reducing reliance on active decision-making during periods of career transition or competing financial priorities.
Employer contributions designed for broader accumulation. Nonelective contributions and well-designed matching structures can provide meaningful retirement savings support, particularly for employees who may be less able to consistently maximize voluntary deferrals.
Inclusive eligibility and vesting structures. Shorter eligibility waiting periods and faster vesting schedules help ensure that employees who experience job changes or career interruptions are still able to benefit from employer contributions.
(Source: Transamerica Institute)
While many employers recognize the importance of plan design in supporting employee retirement outcomes, implementing and maintaining optimized retirement plans can be complex. Employers must navigate:
These responsibilities can make it challenging for employers, particularly those without dedicated retirement plan resources, to evaluate and implement structural improvements, even when the potential benefits to employees are clear.
As the defined contribution system evolves, employers are increasingly exploring alternative delivery models that can help reduce governance complexity while supporting effective plan design.
Pooled Employer Plans (PEPs) represent one example of how retirement plan delivery models are evolving. By allowing multiple unrelated employers to participate in a single retirement plan structure with centralized fiduciary and administrative oversight, PEPs can help improve retirement outcomes while streamlining plan governance and administration.
PEPs can enable broader adoption of plan design features that support improved retirement outcomes, including:
By reducing the operational and fiduciary burden associated with maintaining a retirement plan, PEPs can make it easier for employers to implement and sustain plan designs aligned with long-term participant outcomes.
While these features benefit all employees, they may be particularly important for populations whose retirement readiness is more sensitive to plan structure and consistency.
Women continue to represent a growing and essential segment of the modern labor force.
Improving retirement readiness across the workforce requires:
Employers play a central role in shaping these outcomes. Increasingly, employers are recognizing that selecting a model which reallocates plan responsibilities provides employer with an increased bandwidth to ensure the plan is achieving the desired outcomes for its employees.
As retirement plans continue to evolve, delivery models that combine institutional-quality design with streamlined fiduciary oversight may play an important role in helping employers support improved retirement outcomes for a diverse and dynamic workforce.
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