Two gaps in retirement. One has a name.

It is measured, it is published annually, and it is large.

Eurostat maintains a dataset called Average gender pension gap by age group. It has a code, ilc_pnp13, an age breakdown, a country breakdown and a place in European social reporting. Anyone can open it.

For the EU27 in 2023, among people aged 65 to 74, women's average pension was 24.0 per cent lower than men's.

That is a serious number and this piece does not dispute a decimal of it. Nothing here asks for a smaller pension for anyone.

The question is only what else sits beside it, measured with the same care, by the same office, from data it already holds.

It takes one subtraction, from two numbers Eurostat already publishes.

A pension is an amount per year, and it is also a number of years. The first is measured. The second is not.

Eurostat publishes life expectancy at 65 by sex. For the EU27 in 2023 it was 21.8 years for women and 18.3 for men. At the same retirement age, that is about three and a half fewer years of pension for a man.

There is no indicator for this. No dataset code, no target, no age breakdown built around it, nothing indexed against it in European social reporting. It is a subtraction anybody could do and nobody has been asked to do.

Statistics Norway is the same. Its table catalogue returns pensioners by sex, and nothing when you search it for expected pension years or pension duration.

Say precisely what is and is not being claimed. Eurostat does not refuse to publish this. It publishes both halves of it. What does not exist is anyone reading the pension question against the mortality one.

Before writing any of the above we checked the figure most likely to undo it. It undid a good deal of it.

The tempting next sentence, and the one we were going to write, is that men get fewer good years of retirement. Eurostat publishes healthy life years at 65 as well, so it can be checked rather than assumed.

Healthy life years at 65 are 9.2 for men and 9.6 for women. A gap of four tenths of a year. Women's extra three and a half years are almost entirely years in poor health, not extra healthy retirement.

So the welfare version of this argument is close to false and this piece does not make it. Men do not get meaningfully fewer healthy years of retirement. They get almost exactly the same number.

What survives is narrower and still true. A man draws his pension for about three and a half fewer years, whatever the health status of those years, because a payment does not care how you feel while receiving it.

And the check turned up something better than what it removed. The familiar line that women outlive men is, after 65, largely a statement about years in poor health. That is a fact about both sexes, it is nobody's talking point, and neither the pension gap nor the life expectancy gap will tell you on its own.

It also sharpens the point rather than blunting it. Eurostat has published healthy life years for two decades. The data was never the problem.

If the two gaps were the same thing, closing one would move the other. Denmark shows they are not.

Denmark's gender pension gap in 2023 was 0.5 per cent. For practical purposes it is closed, and it is the only country in this comparison where that is true. It took decades of deliberate policy and it worked.

Danish men still draw their pension for 2.8 fewer years than Danish women.

Solving one gap did nothing to the other. That is the clearest available demonstration that they are different quantities, and that only one of them is being managed.

Not because anyone decided the other did not matter. Because one of them is an indicator with a name, and the other is an arithmetic operation nobody performs.