The Pension Blueprint podcast video transcript 

Episode 6 Transcript

Celine · Diane · Moira

0:00 Introduction

Celine: Welcome to the Pension Blueprint. I'm Celine Chiovitti, Chief Pension Officer at OMERS and your host. Life rarely follows a straight line. Careers evolve, families grow, priorities shift and unexpected challenges can change our financial future in ways we never imagined. So how can women build the confidence and resilience to prepare for whatever life brings? Today I'm joined by Diane Kazarian. OMERS Board Director and former managing partner at PwC Canada and Moira Welsh, investigative reporter for the Toronto Star and author of "The Astonishing Lives of Older Women". Together we'll explore the financial realities many women face. Why planning matters at every stage of life and how strong relationships, thoughtful choices and a little preparation today can make a real difference tomorrow.

Celine: So let's get into it.

Celine: Good morning, welcome to the Pension Blueprint.

Diane: Good morning, nice to be here.

Moira: Thanks for having us.

Celine: I'm thrilled to have this conversation about financial empowerment and why it looks a little different for women and even more excited to be having it with two dynamic, successful women like the two of you.

1:18 Careers with Purpose

Celine: So let's dig right in and, Diane, I'm gonna start with you. Tell us a little bit about your career. You've had a remarkable career both as a successful businesswoman and board director in the public and private sector. Tell us about that journey.

Diane: Great, thank you, Celine and it is lovely to be here, all of us together. And I love the topic because I think it's so important.

Diane: My career has been a great long journey, and it's not over. That journey is continuing and it really started out of university, joined a public accounting firm in the US, moved to Toronto in 1990, joined PW which then became PwC, and my background and my competency is as an auditor, CPA in the US and a CA here in Canada.

Diane: And in my firm, I really explored various roles, I would say every three to five years. So I did my work, tried to have my work speak for itself. Always tried to ensure that people understood the value that I was bringing while not being boastful about it. And then really tried to get new roles every three to five years, had goals in mind.

Diane: And that career trajectory took me right through to June of 2022 as the managing partner of the GTA of PwC. So that was a wonderful career.

Diane: And then I really wanted to sort of explore what would I do next? And really that next chapter and that really turned into corporate board roles, board roles in the not-for-profit sector, giving back to community as well.

Diane: And so I really embraced every opportunity that I had. I took what I learned and the competencies that I had, but translated them into various different roles that perhaps were not completely matched to my competency and took some risks out there.

Diane: So it's been a really wonderful journey and that journey has not stopped.

Celine: Well, I know I have the good fortune of getting to work with you as one of the board directors at OMERS and I sort of get to experience your wisdom and just the way you go and do things each and every day. So thank you.

Celine: Moira, I wanna turn to you. Now you, of course, have a very different background in investigative journalism. So talk to us a little bit about the work that you've done at the Toronto Star and then also how you started writing and your book.

Moira: Well, thank you so much. So at the Star I have for the most part in my career, done a lot of investigative reporting and it really started, especially my interest in writing about older adults in the early 2000s. And myself and my editor did a, spent basically a year looking at issues related to long-term care.

Moira: And that sort of opened the door for me and showed that with every story that you do, every investigation, there might be some change, but it's incremental. And so if you really want to stay focused on pushing forward new ideas, you have to really stay on it and be extremely persistent. And so that was what I have learned over the years to do at the Star.

Moira: Somebody emailed me and was related to my first book but said, you should really look at older women. There are a lot of us and we can't afford to survive. And so I thought, okay, if there's a book in that, I'm going to write it. And so I started working on stories for the Star and I started working on my book and here I am.

Celine: And here you are.

Celine: Well, I read your book and we'll talk a little bit about it. It resonated so much. We're a pension plan. Obviously our youngest member is 14, our oldest is 106. And so looking at people and women and their journeys over a long period of time and really trying to be there for them and with them.

5:28 Planning Your Next Career Chapter

Celine: I've been really fascinated and interested in how people make choices and thinking sort of long-term. And so I've been very aware of in this Instagram world everybody wants sort of instant success. And so you kind of go online and everyone's life is perfect.

Celine: But the reality is, as you've said, your career is long and you're always needing to think about, I guess, what's next. And so talk a little bit more about the chapters. And you talked about three to five years. Like were you actively thinking about that as you were going through your career journey?

Diane: Sometimes. I think you have to be very balanced in your approach. So when you are working on a project or you get a big role in a company, in an organization, you really need to be present in that role, do a great job and not be so opportunistic that immediately you're thinking about like what's the next thing. So sometimes people do do that to the point of wanting this like instant success, right?

Diane: And so for me in an accounting firm or an advisory firm like a PwC, what can you do besides accounting and auditing and consulting? Well, there's lots of things you can do.

Diane: These are 10,000-person firms, many different business lines and product lines leading people.

Diane: And so what I really embraced was with mentorship and help from others is what's sort of coming around the corner, what's happening out there in the marketplace. I did a lot of reading, a lot of research.

Diane: And when it came time for me to retire, I wasn't ready to just retire and I really don't like the word. To me, it's just another chapter in your life. It's a board portfolio for me. I've been very fortunate to be working on the OMERS’ board and a number of other wonderful boards.

Diane: I also do a lot of volunteer work at St. Joe's. I'm the chair of the board of the St. Joe's Foundation.

Diane: And so I took my skills, crafted them around what I wanted my next chapter to be, which is around a board portfolio and worked very hard to make that happen. Lots of peaks and valleys. These things don't come easily. No roles come easily to your question of instantaneous stardom and success and so on. It's just not that way.

Diane: In the real world, we must be patient. We must have courage and we must listen and learn and move forward.

Celine: I love that. And I think that the notion of hard work, putting in the time, putting in the effort, building out your network and really thinking about what is that next step, but showing up in excellence and sort of doing that.

8:12 Women and the Gender Pension Gap

Celine: Moira, I want to talk a little bit about the investigative part of your journey. You do obviously you're pulling data and gathering information and getting people to talk to you. With respect to this specific topic about women and empowering women and their financial sort of outcomes, how did you go about doing that research and how did you get women to even tell you their stories?

Moira: Such a good question. So what I saw originally with this concept was we are living in a time of longevity, rising longevity. Women will increasingly live a lot longer than men and these women are experiencing the gender pension gap which we can get into.

Moira: So they're living longer with less and so to do that I reached out to, well first of all the woman who emailed me started the process and then so she started some introductions. One of the women she introduced me to was a woman named Pat Dunn and she is one of the main characters in my book. The main women who, there are three women who provide sort of the foundational stories of the book and carry it through and she led me to some other women who were willing to speak.

Moira: But it was very hard to get women to go on the record and talk and for many reasons some of them just feel so embarrassed about their situation. They, as I say, they sort of began their adult lives in the robust middle class and never expected to end up couch surfing as some would say or with so little money. Others gave a lot of their income or gave up a lot of their income to stay at home and care for parents and then said later, you know, I feel like I did something really wonderful but it didn't work out for me very well financially for my own life moving forward.

Moira: So there are a lot of moving pieces.

Celine: Yeah, I was really touched by the book and the stories.

Celine: We've talked about Pat, Susan and Elizabeth and what really I think touched me the most was like these are regular women who are, you know, raising children and married and, you know, going on vacations and doing all the things and then something happened unexpectedly in each of their lives that sort of changed their situation as older women. And so can you talk, I guess, a little bit about the financial realities of older women today?

Moira: Well, the gender pension gap, you can measure it in a couple of different ways.

Moira: But for example, OECD looks at it at 22% in Canada, 34% in the United States. And that is the difference in retirement income between women and men. And so that doesn't necessarily include housing, like if you own a house that is not included in the gender pension gap. And we could have a whole discussion about that as well. But women for the most part are left with less than men for many reasons. One is, they give birth to children, so they stay at home, maybe six months, maybe a year or more. Sometimes CPP, the Canada Pension Plan, will make exceptions for that for a certain period of time.

Moira: For the most part, private pensions do not. So women come back to work. They have, you know, a guy who would work beside me might retire before I could, because he hasn't stayed home on mat leave or taken, you know, any kind of paternity leave. There's the motherhood penalty and a lot of different issues. Women do a lot of caregiving for their parents, so they take time away. So all these different roles that generally, not always, but generally fall to the female, leave them with less money later in life.

Celine: Yeah. We've been spending a lot of time at OMERS talking about the gender pension gap and really trying to take active steps to try and narrow it.

Celine: And really focusing mostly on the fact that women take more time away from their male counterparts to have and care for children or others. And so how do we help make it more accessible for them to purchase that time? But part of the issue, a lot of it is systemic for sure. And we need to do better, I think, as a society as a whole, in really tackling some of these systems that were created back in the 1960s.

12:47 Financial Awareness and Career Choices

Celine: And so Diane, maybe my next question to you, and it's more around, I know you do a ton of mentorship and I have a daughter, you have a daughter. Do you talk to young women about their finances and saving for the future and taking those career opportunities? And we talk about sort of the motherhood penalty and sort of people sort of stepping back sometimes in their career because they want to have children and care for children and almost giving things up. Do you think about that? Are those some of the things that you talk to your mentees about?

Diane: Absolutely. And it's actually men and women.

Celine: Yes.

Diane: Because you actually have to have the conversation with both of them. But it's really about awareness. So when you're in your 30s, you're not necessarily thinking about your pension. And you just feel that it's so far out there. And having that intentionality and awareness around what a pension is, how it works in your organization, what your service means, and all of those sort of things is very important to understand.

Diane: So we talk about that. We talk about maternity leave a lot and ensuring that you don't feel like you're going to be left behind. How does that work? More women like to take a little longer time and a lot of men are taking their paternity leave too. And so how do you do that in the right framework with the right support in the organization so that you're not losing out in terms of a possible promotion? To me, it's about conversations. You've got to have the conversations around these matters about financial planning and so on.

Diane: And I just think that a lot of people are not as focused around it. So you've got to kind of sit them down and really have that conversation.

Celine: Yeah. I think we just need to do a better job having the conversations about...

Celine: It's not a sprint, it's a marathon. I go back to my daughter, who's 27 years old and just starting out. And it's a tough economy right now. Like just making ends meet is tough. But having those conversations about like, are you prioritizing yourself and paying yourself, especially if you have a pension plan, like what you have going for you is the fact that you're so young. And so how do we have these conversations?

15:04 When Life Changes the Plan

Celine: And I guess did anything surprise you from the data that you saw? Like what could, if I think of Pat and Susan and Elizabeth, what could they have done differently, do you think?

Moira: That's a really interesting question. I think they ask themselves that as well. But there's not much. I mean, sometimes life gets in your way. So those three women were all divorced and raising children for the most part on their own. And people say, well, why don't your kids help your adult children help? And that's a question that becomes a little bit controversial, I think. And that's one of the points that sort of surprised me when I was researching this book, because I might have wondered the same thing. Why doesn't your son help out? But the reality is, those kids, the mothers are very much aware that their children are paying for expensive mortgages.

Moira: They've got careers, they've got children, they're running around, they're trying to make life work for themselves in a stretched society where we have this incredible cost of living crisis for so many people. So why would a mom really want to impose her needs on the child? And that's basically what they all told me. They would not do that. What Susan, who lives in Ottawa, told me is that women either cannot afford life, to rent homes, they can't afford them, or so they live in their cars.

Celine: I was shocked by that.

Moira: Yes, yes.

Moira: And it is increasingly common to see that. And she says, we either live in our cars because we can't afford rent, or we live in our cars because we can't afford life. And so instead of just living in your little apartment and doing nothing else, because you have absolutely no money to do anything other than feed yourself and pay your rent, some women, not all, but some will choose to live in their cars so they can see the world and be part of it. And I will say I was chatting with a friend the other day, and he said, I don't think he really believed me when I told him about the women living in their cars.

Moira: And so he was speaking with a friend, a dog-walking friend, and the dog walker's wife is a family doctor. And I guess this guy told his wife, and she said, I have three patients who live in their cars.

Celine: It was eye-opening to me. And I think of the fact that we are going to have more and more and more individuals turning 65 and older and so having these conversations is really, really important. And I think there's a lot of shame associated with it. I think especially when you get older in life, when you haven't taken the time and potentially looked at your finances and prepared for it, there's a lot of shame. And so I think we just need to do a better job in talking about it.

18:01 Community and Connection

Celine: I want to talk a little bit about community. And the other piece of the work that you've been doing is just demonstrating how these women have built a different community for themselves. And so whether they've lost a loved one or have gotten divorced, they've sort of started to build community together. And can you talk a little bit about that, Moira?

Moira: It's so interesting. And it really is the key to a life worth living, basically, and our longevity as well, actually. So I'll give the example of Pat. Pat was living, she was married, she had two children, they lived in Oakville. She was a member of the Bronte Yacht Club. And she ultimately got divorced. And then she met another man. And they fell madly in love and had a wonderful relationship and decided in their years of when they decided to retire, they would sail down around, you know, through the Caribbean and so on. And things did not go as planned.

Moira: And so she ended up coming back on her own to a vastly different landscape.

Moira: She felt very alone. She had no money, real estate had skyrocketed, her friends had all gone, you know, moved across the country as people do when they retire. And she was so alone, she found herself a trailer that she bought. She lived in a trailer park in Peterborough. So she went to a community centre with older adults in sort of a coffee, you know, meetup. And she sat down with three other women, and just sort of made herself feel very bold, you know, walked up and introduced herself. And the two kept talking and one turned to her and said, you know, tell me about yourself.

Moira: And so she said, you know, I just moved here. Where did you move? Where are you living? She said, I live in the trailer park. And the woman looked at her, and then looked away and joined the two other women. And so Pat sat there by herself, and then got up and left and she was devastated. So all of which is to say, you know, months unfolded, she ended up creating a community for herself because she posted in like her moment of despair, she posted a message on Facebook and said, is anybody else out there living like me?

Moira: I'm a woman in my 60s. I cannot afford to survive in Canada. And then she closed up her laptop and went to sleep. And when she woke up the next morning, there were 10 messages and then 20 and 100 by the end of the month. And in doing that, she met women and created a community. She actually created a larger community. But at the start, she became close enough to a couple of women that she came back to Peterborough, and they found a place together. And now she says that especially one of the women who lives on the upper floor with her, she said, I love her.

Moira: She said, she's my friend. And I can't live without her.

Celine: Yeah, there's a lot of research about, you know, getting older and loneliness and I and even more for men, quite frankly, who have so much invested, I think, historically in their career and have not taken the time to build out that sort of friend circle. And so I'm, you know, I left with what you've said throughout your entire career is build out the network, build out the communities. And so when you went and ended the first chapter at PwC, you already kind of knew what you were going to do. And so I feel like you were excited by it more than anything.

Celine: Is that?

Diane: Oh, I was very excited. It wasn't like, Oh, I'm leaving this career and I'm dreading my next chapter. No, I, it was, it was, I was so excited to explore, you know, what this could be. And it made me drive those 3 to five-year goals that I talked about before throughout that career. Well, I was absolutely in that zone doing that. And I still do. Because I'm always curious, right? I'm curious. And so it's so exciting. And I think that you have to embrace these, these times of change in your life, you have to be agile.

Diane: Life is never constant. Right. And some people don't want to do a second chapter. And that's okay, too.

22:29 Investing in Relationships and Yourself

Celine: So many golden nuggets that I think our listeners can take away from today. I'm going to wrap up and I'm going to start with you, Diane, if you could give our listeners—break down everything that you've said and give them sort of one career piece of advice, what would you tell them?

Diane: My biggest career advice is that really focus on the relationships in your organization inside and outside, nurture those relationships. Don't treat your work as a transaction. Don't treat people as a transaction.

Diane: And this advice, I think will serve one well over a long period of time. And you know, many of the things that you were saying, more community, it's all about people. And you know, if you really cherish what relationships mean to you, you will be able to build them, build new ones, nurture the ones that you have. And it becomes a very natural thing. But sometimes it also has to be intentional.

Celine: Yeah, I love that. It needs to be intentional. And don't don't treat it as a transaction. Put your heart into almost everything that you do. I love that. Okay, Moira, last word from you, maybe one takeaway from all the research that you've done. What would what would you like our listeners to know?

Moira: I would say to women of all ages, think about where you're going. You don’t have to have it planned out too, too far in advance. But think about yourself. And I started to say this when I give talks to people is yes, mothers, we do everything for our children. It's what we do for the most part, but put a bit of money aside, put a bit of consideration aside for your future, because there will come a time when those children will be out the door. And they will, if we have done our jobs correctly, they will be going forward in life independently.

Moira: And so we need to find our way forward as well. And it really helps because we have this great longevity many decades ahead of us to to have the financial health to to live well. And we talk about our lifting weights and strong muscles and good bone density. But we often don't think about our financial well-being. And that's a big piece of it. And then again, it goes back to relationships also, we we need to connect with people, create those communities, people who are older than us, people who are younger than us.

Celine: Yeah, be intentional, be mindful about it, think about it. And it's okay to be selfish every once in a while and think about ourselves. Wonderful takeaways. Thank you so much for this conversation. I know our listeners will get so much from it.

Diane: Thank you.

Celine: Appreciate you both.

Moira: Thank you.

Diane: Thank you.