Remember the Women: Inequality is a Women’s Issue

At last, with the Occupy Wall Street Movement that began in September 2011, the media and politicians have begun to discover what most of the country has long known: economic inequality in the United States. The powerful slogan “We are the 99%” has breathed life into the dismal fact that 1% of the nation is thriving while the rest of us are, at best, treading water. In fact, in the past 4 years, the gap between the rich and the poor has more than doubled. The top 1% of earners have increased their portion of total income from 8% to 18%, while the portion of the bottom 20% is down from 8% to 5% (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2011). Although poverty (and that, in itself, is misleading, since the official poverty level is absurdly low) and near poverty have increased for all since the housing bust and the Great Recession, women are, once again, suffering the most. Women are 29% more likely to be poor than are men, with an annual median income (for those working full-time, full year) of only 77% of that for men. The gender wage gap is even more pronounced when you examine how women of color are faring. For African American women, it is 61.9% and for Latina/Hispanic women, it is 52.9% (Institute for Women’s Policy Research [IWPR], 2010a, Legal Momentum, 2011). While white women are earning $36,278 to white men’s $47,127 (only a little over twice the poverty level for a family of four), comparable figures are $31,824 for African American women and $27,181 for Latina/Hispanic women (IWPR, 2010a).

When we dig further into how women are actually faring, the results are dismaying, shocking—abominable. IWPR (2010b) released a study, broken down by state, of how poor women are doing in three areas. In the United States, fully 31% of poor women have no health insurance. Massachusetts, with its statewide health insurance, ranks first, with only 7.6% without insurance, and Texas ranks last, with 56% without any health insurance. The figures for SNAP (the new acronym for the Food Stamp Program) are 61% of poor women without the benefit nationwide. Maine ranks first, where “only” 45.6% of poor women receive no food stamps, while California is at the bottom, with more than 77% receiving none. Finally, the figures for cash assistance (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or TANF) are most startling. In the United States, almost 88% of poor women with children receive no cash assistance! The District of Columbia does “best,” with more than 60% receiving no cash assistance, and Louisiana is the worst, with 95.9% receiving none (IWPR, 2010b). More than 15 years ago, before the TANF legislation was passed, a number of academicians in social work, women’s studies, and other fields formed the Women’s Committee of 100 to alert feminists in academia that “welfare was a women’s issue.” We held teach-ins, lobbied women in Congress, and even ran a full-page ad in the New York Times. We were ultimately unsuccessful in stopping this program that replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children, ending assistance as an entitlement and fixed a maximum 5-year lifetime limit for poor women with children receiving cash benefits. Well, now we have arrived at the perfect storm of high unemployment and the 5-year limit year (and in many states shorter time limits). Even the low-wage, dead-end jobs that many of these women were pushed into during the time of economic expansion are gone. Is it a surprise that so many female-headed families with young children are now homeless?

What about older women? We know that women who are poor when they are young will be poor when they get old. They will receive less in Social Security because they may have taken time out to raise children. Even when they were working, they earned less, and they are less likely to have worked in jobs with any pension plan. If they are single, without a partner’s income, retirement fund, or assets, they are most vulnerable to facing their last years in dire need. Women are more likely to rely on Social Security for most of their income than are men. This is especially true for Latina and African American women (IWPR, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c). The new proposals to raise the age for Social Security and to change the formula for cost-of-living increases will hit women harder because we live longer and will cumulatively lose more. Seventy percent of older single women will suffer “asset insecurity,” which means that they will have a good chance of outliving their assets. The income insecurity of older single women has increased by one third, and 60% of these women face “burdensome” housing (Demos, Institute on Assets and Social Policy, 2011).

If feminists are not outraged, we should be. What are these women doing to care for themselves? How can they care for their children? How are they surviving? Do we care—or even if we do, are we too immersed in academic arcana, pretty theorizing, and chasing scarce research grants to get involved? Or are we desperately trying to buck the patriarchal system for getting tenure while juggling our family responsibilities?

As one of our feminists foremothers, Ernestine Rose, counseled us, “Educate, Agitate, Advocate.” That is what we must do. Social work is not a value-neutral academic discipline (not that academic disciplines really are either). It is a profession, rather than an academic discipline, with a value base, among which is social justice. We have a responsibility, therefore, to be part of the change that is fermenting now. We need to educate our students so that they, too, will be enraged by the gender inequality in our society. We must educate about the importance of social benefits and of the value of the welfare state. We need to promote feminist values of caring for each other, rather than the ultralibertarian view of every “man for himself.”

We need to agitate, so that social workers see their connection to feminist values, social justice, and gender inequity. There is a lot of “social justice” being written about in social work. Most schools have it in their mission statements now. But what does it mean? How is it being operationalized beyond fuzzy generalizations? If the growing economic inequality in our society, and particularly how it is affecting women, is not a form of injustice, what is? What are we doing about it in our own schools and agencies?

We must advocate and teach our students how to be effective advocates for social justice. We need to advocate at the federal, state, and local levels against the dismantling of Social Security, for more financial assistance for poor families, the unemployed, and those with disabilities; for child care; for lower (or free) college tuition; and for more educational opportunities for poor women. We need to advocate for higher wages and better health and retirement benefits and against tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations. Finally, we need to advocate for a society in which people care for each other and understand that we are all interdependent and that we all need support some time in our lives. This time of economic crisis, with the growing awareness of how the 99% are hurting because of the 1% who are benefiting, provides an opportunity for feminists to engage in changing our society—and to remember the women!