Remember the Women: Inequality is a Women’s Issue

At last, with the Occupy Wall Street Movement that began in September 2011, the media and politicians have begun to discover what most of the country has long known: economic inequality in the United States. The powerful slogan ‘‘We are the 99%’’ has breathed life into the dismal fact that 1% of the nation is thriving while the rest of us are, at best, treading water. In fact, in the past 4 years, the gap between the rich and the poor has more than doubled. The top 1% of earners have increased their portion of total income from 8% to 18%, while the portion of the bottom 20% is down from 8% to 5% (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2011). Although poverty (and that, in itself, is misleading, since the official poverty level is absurdly low) and near poverty have increased for all since the housing bust and the Great Recession, women are, once again, suffering the most. Women are 29% more likely to be poor than are men, with an annual median income (for those working full-time, full year) of only 77% of that for men. The gender wage gap is even more pronounced when you examine how women of color are faring. For African American women, it is 61.9% and for Latina/Hispanic women, it is 52.9% (Institute for Women’s Policy Research [IWPR], 2010a, Legal Momentum, 2011). While white women are earning $36,278 to white men’s $47,127 (only a little over twice the poverty level for a family of four), comparable figures are $31,824 for African American women and $27,181 for Latina/Hispanic women (IWPR, 2010a). When we dig further into how women are actually faring, the results are dismaying, shocking— abominable. IWPR (2010b) released a study, broken down by state, of how poor women are doing in three areas. In the United States, fully 31% of poor women have no health insurance. Massachusetts, with its statewide health insurance, ranks first, with only 7.6% without insurance, and Texas ranks last, with 56% without any health insurance. The figures for SNAP (the new acronym for the Food Stamp Program) are 61% of poor women without the benefit nationwide. Maine ranks first, where ‘‘only’’ 45.6% of poor women receive no food stamps, while California is at the bottom, with more than 77% receiving none. Finally, the figures for cash assistance (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or TANF) are most startling. In the United States, almost 88% of poor women with children receive no cash assistance! The District of Columbia does ‘‘best,’’ with more than 60% receiving no cash assistance, and Louisiana is the worst, with 95.9% receiving none (IWPR, 2010b). More than 15 years ago, before the TANF legislation was passed, a number of academicians in social work,