By Charlene Crowell –
Never-married Black women have eight cents ($0.08) in wealth for every dollar held by white males.
As the November general election nears, many economic analysts have publicly pondered why so many likely voters are not impressed with reports that point to more hiring, or economic growth. But if these experts spoke with hard-working Americans, they’d understand why so many are disgruntled.
A wealth of new research spells out stark wealth and income disparities that reflect a far different economic dynamic: people who work full time but find it difficult to get ahead financially. Race and ethnicity remain nagging factors. But emerging gender and occupational trends play a large role as well.
A late March update of the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank’s ongoing research on wealth inequalities offers several eye-opening data points:
- Overall, women had only 68 cents in wealth for every dollar held by their male peers;
- When data was filtered by race/ethnicity, never-married Black women and never-married Hispanic women had 8 cents and 14 cents, respectively, of the wealth of white males;
- Never-married Black women, never-married Hispanic women and never-married mothers of any race or ethnicity were the most financially stressed. They had very low levels of wealth to fall back on in an emergency, or to invest in financial stability and mobility; and
- Each of the never-married groups is in the bottom third of the wealth distribution for US households.
But low racial and gender wealth is inextricably tied to income.
An Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) report highlighted the inequities in full-time workers’ pay.
“Equal pay for equal work has been the law of the land for more than a half-century, yet women still cannot get fair treatment when it comes to employment and earnings,” noted Jamila K. Taylor, IWPR President and CEO. “And it’s worse…
Read the full article here
