65+ Financial Issues Women Face Today by Ellevest
The gender pay gap: Women overall make 84 cents for every dollar men make. And those numbers are even lower for women of color, specifically: Black women make 67 cents, Native American women make 55 cents, Latinas make 57 cents, and Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander women make anywhere from 52 to 90 cents for every dollar white men make.
Higher education levels make this gender gap wider: The average pay to a man’s dollar for women with at least a bachelor’s degree is 79 cents.
Women’s pay compared to men’s drops most sharply around the ages 35-44. Men keep climbing for much longer and reach their peak earnings at 55.
Mothers, on average, are paid 74 cents to every dollar paid to fathers.
Progress toward closing the wage gap has stalled. It was closing rapidly through 1995, but has been relatively flat since.
If American women earned minimum wage for the unpaid work they do around the house and caring for relatives, they'd have made $1.5 trillion in 2019.
Many women don’t rejoin the workforce at all after giving birth. This has been called the “motherhood penalty,” which is responsible for three-quarters of the employment gap between men and women in the United States. One in five women say flexibility has helped them stay in their job or avoid reducing their hours, according to one study.
The US is one of six countries with no national paid parental leave.
Fortune 500 companies on average offer twice as much parental leave to mothers as they do to fathers.
One in 10 women in the workforce have a disability, and women with disabilities are significantly poorer than men with disabilities. Partly because they’re more likely to be unemployed, and also because when they do work, they receive considerably lower wages than men with disabilities.
Women report asking for raises as often as men, but get them less often. 59% of men received a raise, while 52% of women did. For every 100 men promoted to a manager level, only 87 women are promoted.
Just 10.4% of the CEOs on the Fortune 500 list are women … and that’s a record high.
Meanwhile: Companies with more women in board, executive, and senior management roles routinely outperform companies without gender (and other) diversity. One report showed that organizations with at least 30% women in leadership roles are 12x more likely to be in the top 20% for financial performance.
Women leaders are twice as likely as men leaders to drive diversity, equity, and inclusion at work.
Women also make more effective leaders than men in all leadership measures.
To see the full list of 65+ issues, [click here]
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