Census Bureau and Census Data

Tomorrow, the Census Bureau will release new data on poverty, income, and health insurance in the U.S. in 2012. As we get ready to crunch numbers, we thought it would be helpful to take a deeper look at what these numbers tell us – and don’t tell us – about the wage gap.

The typical American woman who works full time, year round was still paid only 77 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart in 2011. For women of color, the gaps are even larger. This blog post provides details about the wage gap measure that the Census Bureau and the National Women’s Law Center use, factors contributing to the wage gap, and how to shrink the gap.

What’s behind NWLC’s wage gap figure?

The wage gap figure that NWLC reports at the national level is the same as that reported by the Census Bureau – the median earnings of women full-time, year-round workers as a percentage of the median earnings of men full-time, year-round workers. Median earnings describe the earnings of a worker at the 50th percentile – right in the middle. Earnings include wages, salary, net self-employment income but not property income, government cash transfers or other cash income – so basically the money people see in their paychecks. Working full time is defined as working at least 35 hours a week and working year round means working at least 50 weeks during the last twelve months. Read more »

On Tuesday, the Census Bureau will release new data on poverty, income, and health insurance in the U.S. in 2013. As we get ready to crunch numbers, we thought it would be helpful to take a deeper look at what these numbers will tell us about health insurance.

Where does this data come from?

Every month, the Census Bureau surveys approximately 50,000 households to estimate the unemployment rate. This is known as the Current Population Survey (CPS). Once a year, they ask additional questions on health coverage and income. This supplement is known as the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC). The ASEC questions regarding health insurance explore whether each member of the respondent household had insurance coverage throughout the previous calendar year, and if so, what kind of coverage. According to the Census Bureau, the ASEC is the most widely used source of data on health insurance coverage in the U.S. Read more »

This week, the Census Bureau will release new data on poverty, income, and health insurance in the U.S. in 2012. As we get ready to crunch numbers, we thought it would be helpful to take a deeper look at what these numbers tell us – and don’t tell us – about poverty. Here are a few FAQs on poverty and the Census Bureau data.

What does the poverty rate measure?

The poverty rate measures the percentage of the U.S. population with income below the federal poverty threshold, often referred to as the “poverty line,” for their family size (e.g., $23,283 in 2012 for a family of four with two kids). Income is calculated before taxes and includes only cash income such as earnings, pension/retirement income, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and child support payments. Read more »

Each September the U.S. Census Bureau puts out information on the annual earnings of male and female workers. We’ll soon know the numbers for 2012, but we already know that in 2011, the most recent year for which data are available, women working full time, year round were typically paid just 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts – a loss of $11,084 in 2011. Read more »

Equal Pay Day provides a moment to take stock of our progress during the 50 years since the passage of the Equal Pay Act: today more women are in the labor force, women are pursuing post-secondary education at higher rates, and the pay gap between men and women has narrowed by 18 cents.

 Here’s what was happening back in 1963 . . .

• The Beatles released their debut album, Please Please Me.
• Leave that rotary phone behind! The touch-tone phone was introduced!
• In 1963, the typical woman working full time, year round made just 59 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart. The wage gap was 41 cents.

 And where things stood in 2011 . . .

• In another act from across the pond, Adele’s album 21 topped charts around the world.
• Touch-tones gave way to touch-screens. I personally joined the ranks of what many people now considered the norm: owning a smartphone. Other technology that probably sounded like sci-fi in the 1960s but was commonplace in 2011: iPads, Kindles, Roku, and so on.
• In 2011, the typical woman working full time, year round made just 77 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart. The wage gap is 23 cents.

When you look at the way some things have changed, 1963 feels like ancient history. . Yet there wage gap is one vestige of our past that’s alive and well – five decades later. Read more »

New data from the Census was just released, and NWLC’s calculations show that many women and their families around the country are still struggling in the wake of the great recession. Though poverty stabilized between 2010 and 2011, protecting low income programs remains absolutely critical for women.

In 2011, more than one in five women was poor in Mississippi (22.3 percent) and Louisiana (20.6 percent). Only one state, New Hampshire, had a poverty rate of less than ten percent for women, at 8.9 percent. In the other 47 states and the District of Columbia, between 10 and 20 percent of women lived below the poverty line.

In 2011, more than half of female-headed families with children were poor in Kentucky (51.3 percent), Louisiana (50.3 percent), Mississippi (51.8 percent), and West Virginia (51.6 percent). In eight more states (AL, AR, ID, MI, NM, OH, SC, and TN), their poverty rates were 45 percent and above. Read more »

Last week, the Census Bureau released new poverty data and NWLC has been crunching the numbers. Today, we released our full report showing that poverty rates stabilized in 2011, but remained near historically high levels. As policy makers face critical budget choices in the coming months, we hope that they will remember the real people behind these numbers. We can do more to reduce these numbers.

Yesterday, the Census released 2011 data on health care coverage in the United States. The data reveals some encouraging news: In 2011, we saw positive trends in health coverage for the first time since 2007. Some 1.3 million more people had health insurance compared to 2010, and the overall proportion of those without coverage fell to 15.7 percent, down from 16.3 percent in 2010.

Women also fared better in 2011. The data shows that overall, more women had health coverage:

• An additional 219,000 women had health coverage in 2011, with the percentage of uninsured women (18 to 64) declining slightly from 19.9 percent in 2010 to 19.6 percent in 2011.
• An additional 760,000 women had Medicaid coverage in 2011, with the percentage of women covered through Medicaid rising to 12.3 percent from 11.6 percent in 2010.

NWLC’s analysis of yesterday’s Census data shows poverty rates generally stabilized after three years of increases. But one notable exception is the significant increase in the poverty rate for women 65 and older living alone, which rose to 18.4 percent in 2011 from 17.0 percent in 2010.

We can’t yet explain why poverty increased for this already vulnerable group of women; the poverty rate for all women 65 and older was unchanged from 2010 at 10.7 percent. But we do know that single elderly women are especially reliant on income from Social Security. So we’re worried that policy makers continue to look to the Simpson-Bowles report as a model for deficit reduction, including its proposal to reduce Social Security’s annual cost-of-living adjustment by changing the measure of inflation to the “chained consumer price index,” because this proposal would especially hurt women.

Some politicians seem particularly intrigued by this idea, since it sounds like a technical change that might not be recognized as a benefit cut, and it starts out small. But the cut from the chained-CPI gets deeper every year. That’s particularly harmful to women because they live longer than men. Read more »

If you follow our blog, you already know that the 2011 poverty data were released by the U.S. Census today. The data show that more than 46.2 million people, or 15 percent of all Americans, were considered poor in 2011. Notably, there was no statistically significant change in the poverty rate from 2010—meaning that, unlike the past few years, poverty did not rise in 2011. Poverty among women and children, though higher than poverty among men, was also essentially unchanged in 2011. While it is a relief that the rate hasn’t increased for most groups, poverty still remains historically high.

So what’s the encouraging part? Government programs are keeping people out of poverty. Social Security alone prevented more than 21 million people, including 1.1 million children, from falling into poverty last year—no small feat for a 77 year old program. It’s also important to remember that the Census data is based on incomes that do not include non-cash benefits like food stamps (SNAP) or tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). If the value of SNAP benefits were counted as income in 2011, 3.9 million people would not have been considered poor, and accounting for the EITC would have lifted 5.7 million people above the poverty line. Read more »