Leaving her without enough retirement money to take care of herself. Those 11 years are spend doing important work, caring for children or elderly parents. But they can also hurt her ability to retire.
Fact is, women are still earning less than men do, and they live longer. So they need to save even more for retirement. Unfortunately, those 11 years out of the workforce put a woman even further behind, costing her an average of $659,139 in earnings.
Granted, this comes from an Allstate
ad on the back of this week's
New Yorker, but it really got my attention. Allstate recommends three ways to close the retirement savings gap:
- Employed woman should participate in a company retirement program. (According to the ad, only 47% of employed women do.)
- Unemployed women should invest in a Spousal IRA. (If they don't have their own income, where is this investment coming from?)
- Employed women who participate in retirement programs become educated about their options, which often leads to increasing their contributions to said options.
Here's a web site, based on a book called
Leaving Women Behind: Modern Families, Outdated Laws, that has a more comprehensive set of links about this issue and many others. And the
book, by Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal and John Goodman and Celesate Colgan of the
National Center for Policy Analysis, looks like a good read.
8 comments:
I wonder if that 11 years "out of the game" is largely what affects the salary gap between men and women. Men continue to move up and get ahead, while the average woman takes time off. When she comes back, she's unable to enter the game where she should now have been (or even, for that matter, where she left off).
From this perspective, it seems that sexism might not be as big of an issue in the workplace as we think. This might also explain why women ages twenty to thirty are keeping financial pace with their male counterparts, while the over thirty crowd isn't. Perhaps a large portion of the latter group is leaving the workplace or coming back after a long time in the home. Certainly, their salaries will be lower.
Of course, this doesn't mean that sexism isn't the force driving women to stay home; but this is different than saying that they aren't seen as equals in the workplace.
Does this make any sense? Or am I an ass? Or both?
I think there's a lot of truth to what you're arguing. I don't know if it's the whole truth, but it's definitely nothing but the truth, as it were.
So I vote "not an ass." At least, not in this comment.
I do have to add, though, now that I've reread, that the salary gap compares men and women in the same position. So, nope. The gap is still sexism, although you've pointed out a whole new set of reasons women should be concerned about their jobs. Thanks for that... ass!
:)
Sometimes (and maybe even oftentimes) people within the same position have different years of service. Your average forty-year-old woman then, as Allstate points out, will likely have eleven fewer years of service than her male counterpart. This translates to fewer dollars.
Of course, as you say, megsg-h, this is not the whole story. Maybe a small part of a complex issue, though. Maybe
Ass out.
What is most troubling to me about this situation is that there is no system in our country to account for the time that women are out of the workforce--i.e., very little paid maternity leave, no state supported child care, no guarantee that a woman will be allowed to remain in the same position at the same location when she returns to work after maternity leave (interestingly enough, this particular policy also holds true for national guard troops who have to leave their jobs to be deployed), and no paid family leave. Granted women are guaranteed 12 weeks of maternity leave, and men are also guaranteed 12 weeks of family leave. But these neither men or women are paid when they takes these types of hiatuses from their jobs. Women who take maternity leave can receive disability leave (assuming their employers have such disability insurance), but the pay they get for this leave is much, much less than their normal pay.
This is one area where the U.S. is behind many other Western countries. France, for example, allows women to take up to 2 years off after having a child and still return to that same position without suffering any sort of penalty. Granted, women still end up "behind" as they can't receive promotions while not working, but they don't have to start over again.
That said, I want to offer a different spin on this. I don't know that sexism is the force driving women to stay home, but I think there is something to the converse: sexism is the force driving women to return to the work force rather than choosing to stay home with their children. I'll add another element to this to: stay-at-home dads who want to return to work after staying home with their kids face similar circumstances. Maybe it isn't completely an issue of sexism--maybe our country doesn't value work done in the home.
Yes, it's true that this country does not value work done in the home. But there is also sexism in the workplace that hurts everybody involved, men included. There is a much higher expectation for men to be ideal workers, putting nothing above responsibility to the job. Mothers are expected to prioritize their children over their job and to take more time off for sick kids and school programs, etc. Single women are expected to behave as ideal workers, just as men do, and their salaries are comparable to single men of the same age. It's not gender itself that makes the difference. It's motherhood. (Which, of course is about gender). Fatherhood, across the board, does not carry the same penalty. Men's salaries increase after they become fathers. Women's salaries decrease. There are, of course, individual exceptions, but when you're talking general trends, there's a very real Mommy tax and nothing on the father's side that is comparable.
If we're suggesting solutions, I think treating part time workers more fairly would be a huge step in the right direction. As it is, someone who does the same job at half time makes one quarter what the full time employee makes. Salary and benefits for part time should be comparable to full time. If you work half the hours, you should make half the salary and half the benefits.
I want to add to my last comment that I see where Oxymoron is coming from. As I said, childless/child-free women and men make close to the same money both on average and when they hold the same positions. The big differences come when women become mothers and have increased family responsibilities. Expectations become self-fulfilling prophesies as women take maternity leave and then later take time off to care for children full-time or even just when the kids get sick. It is difficult for men to take on more of this responsibility because employers, expecting men to be ideal workers, are less sympathetic to time-off requests from fathers. What is seen as good parenting by a woman is seen as poor job commitment by a man. The increased family responsibilities for a father translate to working harder to provide financial security for the family. Self-fulfilling prophesies.
The problem is with the whole way that we imagine work in this country. If ANYONE is expected to perform as an ideal worker, someone must be picking up the slack at home. Mom usually has a job, too, but she is the one who will be able to and expected to sacrifice work time to fulfill family obligations when the two conflict (and they will conflict). To reach workforce equality, work needs to be reimagined as one component of a full life, not the primary commitment. When ALL employees are expected to have important obligations outside of the job, then work can be structured in a way that makes it more possible for people to fulfill those obligations in more egalitarian ways. This has to happen not just in policy but also in practice and in the minds of employers and employees alike.
I completely agree with you, M and Sarah. Excellent points; great discussion.
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