There is only so much the pensions industry can take on when it comes to society's wider problems, although encouraging more of us to save into a pension is a start, writes Pensions Expert's editor Samantha Downes.
For many years I lived in a bubble, a bubble where politics, current affairs and the state of the UK's financial services industry was - among friends, family, colleagues and contacts - about the only topic of conversation. There may have been a few lighter conversations around Madonna's latest reinvention or the latest fashion trend, but I can't recall talking or thinking about much else.
That changed in January 2009 when my daughter was born. The dramatic nature of her birth meant I had the gift of having a moment of complete clarity.
I was given a moment where only she and I mattered.
In case you are wondering it was when the anaesthetist offered to knock me out with a general as the emergency c-section I was undergoing to deliver her wasn't really going to plan.
As she held the gas mask and moved it towards my face I knew 100 per cent, that if I breathed in the gas from that mask, that if I went under she and I would die.
I cannot say how or why but I knew.
A moment later she was delivered, all 8lbs of her; and today she is an amazing, fantastic and infuriating 14 year old!
A lifetime of worry
From that moment my life was not the same, in every way. The most obvious was just how anxious I was.
My career had been everything to me, and in many ways I was more driven.
But every moment away from my children, particularly when they were younger, felt like agony. I have an obsessive fitness regime - and I do fit in yoga for balance - which helps me dealing with that separation, and it has got easier.
I love my job, I only ever wanted to be a journalist and that is something I have felt guilty and satisfied with in in equal measure.
I've met other women who have given up very high-flying careers because they wanted to be there for their children; and teenage children need their parents around just as much as a newborn, that I am learning fast!
This brings me to the launch of the PLSA commissioned PMI report, Uncovering the profile of low earners in the UK and the potential for pension saving through auto-enrolment.
Low pay and pensions
One of the starkest things for me, fresh from that launch, was to see in black and white - or rather well-presented graphs with pink, purple and a bit of black and white - just how much women's earning potential drops off after they have children, which in turn means they are not paying enough into their pension.
Women have a right to want to stay at home and be with their children, but they also need to be supported - we could only guess by many of these low-paid women included in the report are not working in sectors where their employer is supporting their career.
I've been writing about pensions for decades and I'm getting tired of writing about gender gaps and pension gaps and why women are still at the thick end of a lifetime of financial inequality.
There are so many issues we need to address; even professional women in largely well-paid careers still have to make tough financial and emotional choices and make sure they bring up children who are well-adjusted, happy and educated in a way that brings them the joy that comes with the opportunity of choice.
Isn't it about time saving enough into a pension wasn't one of them?
