The annual Maria Shriver report on women in America was released earlier this week, and the findings are grim.
Figures from The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink show that approximately 42 million American women are “teetering on the brink” of poverty as they juggle caregiving and working low-wage jobs and the trials of family finances against the background of a recent recession.
Maria Shriver — the report’s co-author — wrote in a statement released with the findings that these women are not simply buckling under the pressure to “have it all”, they’re dealing with the everyday difficulties of making ends meet.
“These are women who are already doing it all — working hard, providing, parenting, and care-giving. They’re doing it all, yet they and their families can’t prosper, and that’s weighing the U.S. economy down,” Shriver explained.
According to the figures, one in three women are either living in poverty or on the brink of it (according to the report, “on the brink of poverty” is estimated as making $US47,000 a year for a family of four). It also found that two-thirds of women are either the primary or joint breadwinners of their families.
The report shows that a disproportionate number of women (two-thirds) made up the minimum wage workers in America, with upwards of 70% receiving no sick days.
“That’s 42 million women and the 28 million children who depend on them, living one single incident — a doctor’s bill, a late paycheck, or a broken-down car—away from economic ruin,” the Shriver Report found.
The average US woman is paid 77 cents for every dollar a man makes for doing the same job, a figure that hasn’t changed in five years. And while women outnumber men in higher education, men still make more money than women who have attained the same level of education.
Of the 3,500 people surveyed, 96% of single mothers said paid leave in the workplace would help them the most and 60% of low-income women said they believe even if they made all the right choices, “the economy doesn’t work for someone like me.”
Nearly 90% of the women struggling to get by said that paid sick days would be “very useful” to them, and it was the number one policy they felt would give them a leg up, “even more than an increase in wages or benefits,” according to the report.
Economists Heidi Hartmann and Jeffrey Hayes of the Institute of Policy Research calculated that paying women who work full time the same amount as men would boost their income by $6,250 a year on average. That extra money would raise 3 million of the nearly 6 million working women who live below the poverty line and would boost the GDP by 2.9% (or US$450 billion).
“We report that closing the wage gap between men and women would cut the poverty rate in half, adding nearly half a trillion dollars to the national economy and boosting the gross domestic product by 2 to 3%,” the report said.
The report includes essays from political leaders, business leaders, journalists,activists, artists and academics including Hillary Clinton, Sheryl Sandberg, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Eva Longoria and Beyonce.
Beyonce implores American to “stop buying into the myth about gender equality. It isn’t a reality yet,” she wrote in the excerpt.
“Today, women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but the average working woman earns only 77 percent of what the average working man makes. But unless women and men both say this is unacceptable, things will not change. Men have to demand that their wives, daughters, mothers, and sisters earn more — commensurate with their qualifications and not their gender. Equality will be achieved when men and women are granted equal pay and equal respect.’
Click here to read the findings from the Shriver report.