On their own, women face wealth gap.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
On their own, women face wealth gap.
22
Tue, 01-13-2004 - 11:08am

This is sad news, IMO.


In income and net worth, women heads of households fall behind others, according to new analysis.


http://money.cnn.com/2004/01/12/pf/women_wealthgap/index.htm?cnn=yes


Households headed by women who are unmarried or not living with a partner have far fewer financial resources than the average U.S. household, according to a study released Monday by the Consumer Federation of America.


Analyzing data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances with the help of economist Catherine Montalto of Ohio State University, the CFA found that women who head households have a median net worth of $27,850 compared with $86,100 for all American households.





Their incomes are lower, too. Women-headed households in 2001 (the year reflected in the latest Fed data) had a median income of $20,000. That's just half the $39,000 median income for all U.S. households.


And a far higher percentage of women-headed households (41 percent) are likely to rank in the bottom fifth of income earners than are all American households, of which only 19 percent rank as low in terms of income.


The discrepancy in wealth for women on their own can be attributed to less education overall, less likelihood of being employed, lower income, and having only one paycheck instead of two to rely on, said Stephen Brobeck, CFA's executive director.


What's more, noted Montalto, there are a notable section of women-run households headed by never married mothers with dependents, divorced and widowed women, all of whom often face steeper financial challenges than other households.


According to the CFA study, women who head households are less likely to have a bachelor's degree or a graduate degree than heads of households as a whole. And they are more likely to have less than a high school education, although a greater percentage of female-headed households have high school degrees than do all heads of households as a group.


In terms of jobs, nearly 40 percent of female household heads reported not being in the labor force versus 27.4 percent of household heads overall.


A lag in savings, too

When it comes to savings, women on their own are also living closer to the edge. Fifty-three percent of female-run households spend all or more of their incomes versus 41 percent of all households. And only 32 percent of women-headed households save regularly compared with 41 percent of U.S. households in general.


In terms of financial planning, only 31 percent of women headed households had a horizon of at least five years; 38 percent weren't planning out farther than the next year.


To boost savings, Brobeck recommends taking advantage of any savings opportunity when it comes along, even if it means putting away just a few extra dollars a month.


Among his top recommendations: participate in automated savings programs at work, particularly those that offer matching funds from an employer such as a 401(k); and ask your bank or credit union regularly deduct some money from your checking account and deposit it into your savings account.


Earmarking some of those savings for a down payment to buy a home is also useful, he said, since home ownership has proven to be one of the keys to building net worth.


For help with savings goals, check America Saves.org, a campaign organized by CFA and other nonprofits in conjunction with corporations and government agencies to help Americans build their net worth.

cl-Libraone





 


Photobucket&nbs

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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Wed, 02-18-2004 - 3:25pm
Take This Job and Be Thankful (for $6.80 an Hour).

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/18/books/18MASS.html


In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, the issue of poverty in America rarely arises. Only Senator John Edwards of North Carolina regularly mentions the 35 million Americans (or 42 million by some counts) who have been marooned amid this country's rising prosperity. Yet even he rarely gets specific about what should be done to help them.


David K. Shipler has spent the last six years speaking to these other Americans. His book "The Working Poor: Invisible in America" is in the tradition of Michael Harrington, Edward R. Murrow and more recently Barbara Ehrenreich as it seeks to alert a complacent nation about the misery and deprivation in its midst.


Mr. Shipler is a former correspondent for The New York Times and author of three previous books, one about race in America, another on the Soviet Union in the late 1970's, and the third an exploration of Arab and Jewish relations in the Middle East (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize). For his latest book he visited New Hampshire towns and North Carolina fields, Los Angeles sweatshops and Washington housing projects, talking with low-wage workers on the edge of poverty. By watching them try to escape, he writes, "we see vividly the obstacles they have to cross."


To succeed in such a project a writer needs to be both a witness and a wonk, the former to dramatize the plight of the poor and the latter to devise policies to help them. At the outset Mr. Shipler states that his intention is to see the predicament of the poor "with clear eyes, not through an ideological lens," so as to "challenge and undermine longstanding assumptions at both ends of the spectrum."


As a witness Mr. Shipler is indefatigable. Interviewing cashiers and seamstresses, burger flippers and migrant workers a dozen or more times, he has gotten them to open up and share the grim realities of their lives.


Among his compelling subjects is Caroline Payne, a hard-working 50-year-old who earns $6.80 an hour stocking shelves and working the cash register at a Wal-Mart superstore in New Hampshire. This is just 80 cents an hour more than she earned more than 20 years earlier. She must cope with four children, including a teenage daughter who has epilepsy and a low I.Q.; bosses who will not let her juggle her schedule to accommodate her daughter's needs; $12,000 in credit-card debt; nagging ailments that go untreated because she cannot afford health insurance; and, not least, the loss of her teeth, which makes her look 10 years older than she is and which causes male managers to pass her over at promotion time.


As Mr. Shipler notes, Ms. Payne's face captures the insidious, self-reinforcing nature of poverty. "If she had not been poor," he writes, "she would not have lost her teeth, and if she had not lost her teeth, perhaps she would not have remained poor."


Debra Hall, a "welfare mother" in Cleveland forced to seek a job after welfare reform, makes $7 an hour working from 3:30 to 11:30 a.m. in a bakery, "flipping bread on the dreaded garlic line." After a few months her wage jumps all the way to $7.90. After paying the bills and taking care of her two children, one of whom has Down syndrome, she rarely has more than $8 in her bank account. Her fellow workers — some have been at the bakery for years — all seem "trapped in gloom," Mr. Shipler writes, and Ms. Hall seems "doomed to repeat her family's inability to emerge from low wages."


As such bleak tales unfold, the reader can only feel outrage at the multiple injustices these people must endure: the low wages and high interest rates, the tax preparers eager to bilk them, the government workers who brush them off, the malnutrition, the shabby housing, the rats. In his most chilling chapter Mr. Shipler describes the epidemic of sexual abuse afflicting poor women.


"Even though I never posed the question," he writes, "sooner or later most of the impoverished women I interviewed mentioned that they had been sexually abused as children." Many have trouble trusting men and maintaining families, which makes them more likely to be poor.


It is here, in exploring the roots of poverty, that "The Working Poor" falters. The issue of marriage is a good example. As Mr. Shipler notes, half of all poor families are headed by single women. Time and again in his case studies, their single status emerges as a major factor in their troubles. "Married, Ann was in the middle class," he writes of one woman. "Divorced, she sank rapidly." One does not have to endorse President Bush's venture to promote marriage to recognize that single parenthood is a significant variable in the poverty equation. Yet Mr. Shipler spends little time analyzing this.


The same is true of race and ethnicity. The poverty rate among African-Americans and Latinos is about three times that of non-Latino whites. "The Working Poor" is full of people like Leary Brock, an African-American living in Washington. Her parents had solid blue-collar jobs, her father as an electrician, her mother at the United States Agriculture Department. Yet Ms. Brock dropped out of high school, had four children by four fathers and became a crack addict. The Brock family tree was like "the wildest of Alexander Calder's mobiles," Mr. Shipler writes, "a chaotic whirl of offspring from multiple liaisons by Leary and, a generation later, by some of her children."


Understanding how so many African-American households have experienced such downward mobility seems critical to figuring out ways to help them. Alas, Mr. Shipler sidesteps the issue. His preface states that having written about black-white divides in his last book, "A Country of Strangers," he has decided here to avoid race and instead concentrate on "the dynamics of poverty that are broadly shared across racial lines." But how can one write a book about poverty in America and not deal with race?


In his conclusion Mr. Shipler asserts that in the fight against poverty "holistic remedies are vital," and he proposes a smorgasbord: adopting "living wage" laws, providing more vocational training, broadening access to health care, expanding early intervention programs. These all seem worthy, yet familiar. Here as throughout, Mr. Shipler avoids saying anything too controversial and as a result his book seems unlikely to change minds on either the left or the right.


Nonetheless, by exposing the wretched condition of these invisible Americans, he has performed a noble and badly needed service.

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Wed, 02-18-2004 - 10:14pm
<>

Well there's the, "you don't say" headline of the day.

Newsflash--Single parent households have fewer financial resources than two parent households.

Single women, on the other hand, have comperable saleries to single heterosexual men. Homosexual males earn more than average; go figure.

Renee

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Thu, 02-19-2004 - 11:05am
<>

Where did you get this "news". Women have never made coparable salaries.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Thu, 02-19-2004 - 12:50pm
I was wondering just when we had closed the pay gap myself....

Also, any statistic about gay men's salaries is destined to be skewed because you're only counting men who are out of the closet. Those men are more likely to have white collar jobs where their sexuality is accepted (advertising, fashion, media, etc...) which are generally higher paying fields.

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Thu, 02-19-2004 - 1:38pm
Single men & women with comparable education make comparable salaries. I even heard a couple months ago, in the mainstream media that female executives outnumber male ones now, which of course, is no surprise since females in med school & law school have been outnumbering males for quite some time now. Grad school, too.

Renee

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Thu, 02-19-2004 - 1:49pm

>"Single women, on the other hand, have comperable saleries to single heterosexual men."<


Not women who are heads of household..... see chart by Fed, in first post in this thread or at this link....


http://money.cnn.com/2004/01/12/pf/women_wealthgap/index.htm?cnn=yes


 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Thu, 02-19-2004 - 3:23pm
I was not speaking of single parents.

Renee

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Fri, 02-20-2004 - 11:06am
<>

Please support this statement with reliable links.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Fri, 02-20-2004 - 1:06pm

http://www.now.org/issues/economic/alerts/04-04-03.html


Women in Red! Equal Pay Day is April 15


April 4, 2003


Women are still in the red when it comes to pay. According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau statistics, women today, on average, are paid only 76 cents in wages for every dollar that men are paid. That represents a snail-like increase of less than a cent per year since the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, when women were paid 59 cents compared to a man's dollar in wages. If the same pace continues, we may not achieve parity until 2042!


http://www.bpwusa.org/Content/Policy/SignatureEvents/EqualPayDay/SamplePressRelease.pdf


>"This is the way it is in technology professions in which job demand is outpacing the supply of qualified workers.


A study by techies.com found that, on average, women in tech careers are making 92 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earn. While hardly full parity, it's considerably higher than the 73 cents on the dollar women earn compared to men in jobs overall, according to 1998 U.S. Census data."<


See chart for tech. related salaries at link.


Quote from...


http://www.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/trends/01/17/techies/

cl-Libraone~

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-25-2003
Fri, 02-20-2004 - 5:13pm
If you have trouble keeping up with the news, or only have time to read the headlines, ifeminist.com is one good resource for you to keep in mind, so you don't have to continually ask others to do your own research on issues that are common knowledge to those of us who keep up with the news.

Here are quotes from a few articles that were so easy to find, nearly anyone could do it:

"When you factor in differences in occupation, differences accounted for by age, occupational choice, total amount of experience in the workforce, then almost all of the supposed gap disappears," Bird said.

http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/1508

When women behave in the workplace as men do, the wage gap between them is small. June O'Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that among people ages 27 to 33 who have never had a child, women's earnings approach 98 percent of men's.

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba/ba392/

When it comes to their careers, men and women tend to take different paths. And as time goes on, those paths diverge. They separate so much in later years that some economists argue that the pay gap between men and women is misleading and very nearly irrelevant.

"It's very hard to say what the real differential is," says June O'Neill, economics professor at Baruch College in New York City and former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "If there is any differential, it's probably not very big."

"It seems to me in order to close the wage gap we've reached the point where women will have to behave exactly like men," adds Christina Hoff Sommers, resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute....

Actually, women appear to do better at part-time jobs than do men (who are often graduate students needing extra income). For example, those who worked 34 hours or less last year earned 112 percent the income of their male counterparts, according to the latest government data. Even those women who worked 35 to 39 hours earned almost as much as their male counterparts: 98.6 percent.

Thus, the real pay gap looks much narrower when taking into account the different work/life paths that men and women tend to take.

"What all the academic economists do agree on is that the wage gap is something between 2 to 4 cents on the dollar," says Christine Stolba, senior fellow with the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative nonprofit education group based in Arlington, Va. That's a far cry from the 27 cent gap in the census data.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0819/p16s01-wmwo.html




Renee

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