Living longer and earning less: are elderly women doomed to be poor?

That's 133,000 more women since just last year who are over 65, living alone, on about $5,500 a year, or $458 a month, according to the National Women's Law Center, which just released its analysis of the census. Around 2.6 million elderly women are living in poverty as of last year, the NWLC said, and 733,000 of those live in extreme poverty.
The reason for this, however, is still perplexing. "We don't know right now what it's due to," said Katherine Gallagher Robbins, a senior policy analyst at the NWLC.
 

[…]
 
It's not surprising that women are behind the eight-ball. To some extent, women are doomed to more financial suffering than men: women live longer and earn less. The NWLC statistics, drawn from the census, show just how bad it is for women: 17.8 million women lived in poverty in 2012, 44% of whom lived in extreme poverty. Extreme poverty means "income at or below 50% of the federal poverty level", which amounts to less than $5,500 a year.
When the economy is bad for women, it's also bad for children. According to the NWLC, 16 million children lived in poverty in America last year, and 44% of them also lived in extreme poverty. "The poverty rate for female-headed families with children was 40.9%, compared to 22.6% for male- headed families with children," the NWLC noted.