Report: Single Women Are Aging Into Poverty

401k, retirement, female, women, wealth gap

Let's help her.

The gender wealth gap is well known at this point. But another problem—rarely acknowledged, yet perhaps even more troubling—has emerged among a specific segment of the female population.

The financial state of single women ages 45 to 65 is being threatened from a number of angles, and issues within the retirement industry are at least partially to blame.

Systemic barriers are limiting this cohort’s ability to build and preserve their wealth, argues a recent report produced by Asset Funders Network in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice and Closing the Women’s Wealth Gap.

In a report titled On Shaky Ground: Stabilizing the Financial Security of Single Women, researchers reveal how this problem is growing increasingly severe.

Despite being “the first generation to benefit from expanded access to higher education, credit and other asset-building opportunities originating from the policy changes resulting from the civil rights and women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s,” the report explains, “15 million single women within this cohort—particularly Black and Latina women—have experienced substantial wealth loss in the last two decades.”

The figures are staggering overall and downright mind-blowing when broken down by race.

Women within this segment lost a median of 36 percent of their wealth from 1995 to 2016, with a 28 percent drop for white women and a 74 percent drop for black women in the nine-year period between 2007 and 2016.

Researchers have identified six problem drivers contributing to single women’s financial difficulties:

  1. Limited financial capability
  2. Ineligibility for employer-based retirement plans
  3. Gender bias in retirement tools and erosion of financial protections
  4. Legacy of racial and sexual discrimination in credit and lending markets
  5. Gender inequities in homeownership
  6. Structural gender inequality

On Shaky Ground illustrates how the women’s wealth gap is exacerbated by the racial wealth gap and explores the causes, which go far beyond the pay gap. It explains how the wealth gap is compounded by imbalances in the tax code, the structure of employer-based benefits, the Social Security system, and market-based products and services. This new report speaks to how the wealth gap is impacting current generations and threatening the financial security of future generations,” the collaborators reiterated.

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