Poverty

In September 2006, the U.S. hadn't been through the Great Recession, there were no iPhones, and the country had only seen one season of "dancing" stars.

September 2006 was also the last time that adult women's unemployment exceeded men's — that is, until LAST month! According to NWLC analysis of today's new jobs data, adult women's (20+) unemployment rate climbed to 7.3 percent in December, 2012. Women's unemployment edged above men's, which at a 7.2 percent rate was unchanged from November:

The increase in unemployment for adult women overall was driven by new women job seekers who couldn't find work. Read more »

UPDATE: View our interactive map, Women and the Minimum Wage, State by State (June 25, 2013)

Analysis by the Economic Policy Institute reveals that nearly one million workers will get a raise from these increases. In each state, women are the majority of the workers who will see their wages go up. The impact on women is the largest in Missouri where they are nearly three-quarters of the workers who will benefit from the increased minimum wage. The economies of these states will also benefit — the increase in minimum wages will add nearly $184 million to GDP in 2013. 

These increases added some more good news to the victories minimum wage workers saw in the last few months — voters chose to increase the minimum wage in Albuquerque, San Jose, and Long Beach, and a bill to raise New Jersey's minimum wage has made its way to Governor Christie's desk.

Sadly, however, the minimum wage is still falling short for millions of Americans, especially women. Read more »

Last week, New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof, a writer I respect and admire enormously, wrote a surprisingly critical piece of the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program. He detailed the stories of a few families, arguing that SSI “condemned [disabled children] to a life of poverty on the dole.”

I have a few stories of my own about disabled adults on SSI, and trust me, they need it. Between 2008 and 2009, I spent a year as a case manager at a homeless shelter in Chicago. In that time, I worked with many guests and clients of the shelter who had mental and/or physical disabilities that prevented them from working. And when you can’t work – it’s hard to have enough income to let you meet basic needs. That’s where assistance programs came in.

One of my clients at the shelter was a man who had been on SSI since he was a child. He had been a part of the program that serves disabled children and had transitioned into the adult program after turning 18. Then in his late 20s, I worked with him as he went through the routine evaluation conducted to check disability status, or check that the person is still in need of SSI. This man wasn’t someone who was trying to cheat the system – he suffered from a mental illness, was unable to work, and as an adult had to continue to prove his need for SSI. His meager SSI check was what paid his rent, bought food, and got him around the city to appointments. Read more »

Did you know that in 2011, Social Security kept 11.7 million women and 1.1 million children out of poverty?

This is just one new fact that we can calculate today thanks to the release of new Census Bureau data that examines a supplemental poverty measure which takes into account the impact of public programs on families' economic security. For more about poverty measurement, see our FAQ.

This past September, the Census Bureau released the official poverty numbers for 2011, which showed that women's poverty remained high after the recession's end, but was beginning to stabilize in 2011. Our report detailed what the numbers looked like and the trends over time. But what we didn't get to see in that data was how many people were pulled above the poverty line by specific public programs. Today, we were able to take a closer look at how many people were lifted out of poverty by these programs and who they were. Read more »

Senator Alan Simpson wants us to shut up. The Huffington Post reported Simpson's comments at a recent event sponsored by "Face the Facts USA":

"Could you please cut out the babble? Would you quit talking about the poor, the vulnerable, the veterans, the old ladies going over cliffs, the hospices, the bedpans? I mean, what the hell? We all know, all of us know, that that's the people you want to take care of."

You can't blame us for taking it personally. We've had a lot to say recently about women who are still poor, without health insurance, and paid less than men. We've had to point out that cutting programs that serve low-income people especially hurts women and their families, and that the House-passed budget plan slashes these programs in the name of deficit reduction while giving trillions of dollars in new tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans. And we've had to explain the impact of a stealth Social Security benefit cut proposed by the Simpson-Bowles report – reducing the cost-of-living adjustment by changing to a new consumer price index, the "chained CPI." 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.

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 »

The Census Bureau just released new data on poverty in the U.S. in 2011. In the second full year of the recovery that began when the recession officially ended in June 2009, poverty began to stabilize, though at a very high level: the overall poverty rate was 15.0 percent, statistically unchanged from the rate in 2010 (15.1 percent). Here’s a quick look at the numbers for women and families:

• The poverty rate among women was 14.6 percent in 2011, statistically unchanged from 14.5 percent in 2010, but still the highest rate in 18 years. Men’s poverty rate was lower, at 10.9 percent in 2011 (statistically unchanged from 11.2 percent in 2010). A 14.6 percent poverty rate means 17.7 million women were living in poverty in 2011.
• The poverty rate for women 65 and older was 10.7 percent in 2011, unchanged from 2010 and lower than the poverty rate for women overall. However, the poverty rate for elderly women living alone increased significantly to 18.4 percent in 2011 from 17.0 percent in 2010.