Will Your Mother Live in Poverty?

Victoria Pynchon, Contributor

FORBES

http://www.forbes.com/sites/shenegotiates/2013/01/26/will-your-mother-live-in-poverty/

A recent news release by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development predicts poverty for mothers in their elder years.

Documenting the wage gap based on motherhood in many countries, including the United States, the OECD tells the sorry maternal tale in stark numbers.

In the U.S., the wage gap between men and women without children is only seven percent.

Have your first child on American soil, however, and the wage gap rockets to 23%.

That’s not, however, the worst economic news for mothers. The impact of the gender wage gap over a mother’s lifetime is dramatic.

Having worked less in formal employment, but having carried out much more unpaid work at home, many women will retire on lower pensions and see out their final years in poverty. Living an average of nearly 6 years longer than men, women over 65 are today more than one and a half times more likely to live in poverty than men in the same age bracket.

Let me say that again.

Women over 65 today are more than one and a half times more likely to live in poverty than men in the same age bracket.

We know most women no longer have the luxury to tend to child-rearing duties full time. But working with children at home compounds the wretched harvest of most mothers’ lifetime labor.

As the OECD reports, 65% of an American family’s second wage is spent on childcare. For single mothers, of course, that’s 65% of a first wage.

Couple the wage gap, the motherhood penalty, and child care expenses with a 40% single motherhood rate and you get exactly what you’d expect – more than one in five American children living below the poverty line.

We are She Negotiates are working at the top of the corporate, professional and entrepreneurial food chain not simply to bring wage parity to the most successful working women, but to put those women into leadership positions across all civil sectors.

Feminists have been fighting for child care since the first strike for women’s equality in 1970.

We’re forty years down the road and little closer to the goal of affordable childcare for working women than we were back when gender discrimination was legal.