When people talk about the issues that have the biggest impact on women's lives on campaign trails or in boardrooms, the same problems tend to come up: the wage gap, paid leave, child care, violence against women, and reproductive health care. But those structural issues don’t affect women in a vacuum; each has consequences that can sometimes be overlooked.
Take retirement benefits. They might not seem like an obvious feminist issue, but as Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) explains in a new Medium post out now, the current calculation used to determine benefits for older Americans disadvantages women, and it costs us millions of dollars.
Because of work and wage discrimination, Warren explains, and the fact that some women take time out of the workforce to care for children or sick relatives (and do so at higher rates than men), women’s average monthly Social Security benefit is just 78 percent of the average monthly benefit men receive.
It’s more than unfair. It’s catastrophic, and it’s affecting women’s financial futures. The National Institute on Retirement Security reports that women over the age of 65 are 80 percent more likely than men to live in poverty. That’s in part because people who dedicate their time to the care of a child or a relative don’t just make less at their prime earning age, but receive less once eligible for federal benefits.
“That particularly harms lower-income women, people of color, and recent immigrants,” the Medium post adds, with more than 43 million informal caregivers (60 percent of whom are women) spread out nationwide.
The bottom line on that? It’s brutal. A 2011 report found that women over 50 forgo an average of $274,000 in lifetime wages and Social Security benefits when they leave the workforce to take care of an older parent.
Warren, whose poll numbers in the Democratic presidential race have risen over the past few months, has a plan for that.
Her new proposal would make several changes to the Social Security program. First, it would give almost all recipients a boost of about $200 a month, financed with a tax on the wealthiest Americans. But second, it would adjust the formula that the program uses to calculate benefits to assign proper value to the unpaid but crucial work women do for their families. As it stands now, benefits in the program are calculated based on a person’s average lifetime income, with time spent out of the workforce recorded as a zero, whether it’s spent providing childcare or not.
Warren, who has rolled out an impressive plan for affordable child care, wants to fix that. Her plan would replace that zero in the calculate with the average national wage for each month a person provides up to 80 hours of care to a child under the age of six, a dependent with a disability, or an elderly relative. Moreover, as Warren writes, using that benchmark as a baseline would provide a particular advantage to lower-income workers, who might have otherwise made less than the national average. That’s the exact population that Warren wants to help.
“Women make up the majority of caregivers in America, and our current Social Security system doesn't fairly value their work,” Warren said in an emailed statement to Glamour. “My plan recognizes how valuable the work of caregiving is and ensures that people who take time out of the workforce to take care of a relative get the higher Social Security benefits they deserve.”
