All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (30 page)

The study
⁶
showing that single childless urban women under thirty make eight percent more than men in their same age bracket is astonishing. But as Stephanie Coontz points out, the appearance of single urban female success can sometimes reflect the fact that (often predominantly white) educated women tend to cluster in the very same cities that are home to large populations of low-earning (often nonwhite) men without college educations. As discussed, some of the very services that make privileged, educated, single female life attractive and possible in cities—the restaurants and takeout and laundry and home maintenance that
allow women who are not wives to live as if they
had
wives—are often provided, at criminally low wages, by poorer, often immigrant, women and men. If studies were done comparing women
only
to men with similar educational backgrounds, Coontz writes, “[M]ales out-earn females in every category.” She also points to a 2010 survey showing that “female M.B.A.s were paid an average of $4,600 less than men in starting salaries and continue to be outpaced by men in rank and salary growth throughout their careers, even if they remain childless.”
⁷

That women are entering universities and the workforce in large numbers does not mean that they are earning or achieving throughout their lives at the same pace as the men who enter those universities and workplaces alongside them. Structural impediments, from the lack of paid family leave and pay gaps, to lingering and systemically reinforced negative attitudes about female leadership, combine to mean that, at some point, women fall behind men when it comes to earning, promotions, status, and reputation. These inequities can be obscured by the lavish coverage of increasingly abundant educational opportunities and the messages we send to young women about their potential achievement. Those messages may be righteous, but they are not the whole story.

A 2012 report by a compensation research firm found that, while amongst college graduates, pay growth remains about equal for men and women throughout their twenties, at age thirty, the growth in women's earnings slows while men's stays steady.
⁸
That's because it's in their thirties that many college educated women are now having their first children. But Cornell economics and labor professor Francine Blau has offered a further explanation: that men still remain more likely to work in high-paying fields, like business and law, that offer more opportunities to advance, while women are
still
more likely to work in low-paying fields built around service and care, including nursing and teaching, and these fields continue to have lower salary caps.

While the period immediately following Second-Wave feminism saw a change in the gender segregation of some professions, for example, women working as electrical engineers, that rearrangement has again reversed. And low-paying, traditionally feminized fields, including teaching and social work, have in fact become
more
female since 1980.
⁹
The expansion
of other female-dominated professions, such as childcare and home health care, mean that more jobs may be becoming available to women, but they are the kind of jobs with few protections and reliably low salaries. Women make up about 90 percent of the home health business, among the fastest-growing industries in the nation, in which median pay hovers at about ten dollars an hour.
¹⁰
When California passed landmark paid sick-day legislation in 2014, home health care workers, disproportionately female and women of color, were exempted from receiving benefits.

The impact of all this persistent inequity on the economic (in)stability of unmarried women is profound. The question of what's to be done about it is at the heart of a fierce argument being waged between social scientists, politicians, and journalists.

In an extensive 2012 feature in the
New York Times
, “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do,' ”
¹¹
reporter Jason DeParle contrasted the circumstances of two white women in Michigan, colleagues at a day care facility, each with children and comparable salaries. One of them, Jessica Schairer, spent over half her income on rent, relied on food stamps, could not afford to enroll her children in extracurricular activities, or to take time off from work after surgery for cervical cancer. The other, Chris Faulkner, enjoyed a comparatively high household income, lived in a nice home, took vacations, and enrolled her kids for swimming lessons and Scouts.

“What most separates them” DeParle asserted, is “a six-foot-eight-inch man named Kevin.” In other words, the fact that the more secure woman in the story was married to Kevin, a kind, involved, and employed husband. The single thing that DeParle was asserting would have helped Schairer make a more comfortable life for herself and her children was a husband.

But there is another thing that would have helped her situation: money. Money. And federal policy mandating paid medical leave. Despite being in management at the day-care center where she works alongside her slightly better paid counterpart, Schairer was paid just $12.35 an hour.
After a surgery for cervical cancer, she returned to work, against doctors' orders that she take six weeks off, after just one week, because, as she told DeParle, “I can't have six weeks with no pay.”

Higher wages would help Schairer. So would guaranteed paid leave.

The lack of adequate pay protections and social policies that disproportionately make an impact on women are symptomatic of systemic gendered economic inequality. As welfare expert Shawn Fremstad wrote in response to DeParle's story, “Why is it OK to pay the mostly female workers who take care of other people's children and of seniors and people with disabilities so little? . . . Why is it OK to not provide the vast majority of care workers with basic employment benefits like paid sick and disability leave?” Noting that even Faulkner, the wealthier woman in the set-up, didn't make much more than Schairer and, in fact, was so much better off only because her husband, a computer programmer with a comparable college degree and demographic background, made so much more, Fremstad asked, “Why does he, a computer programmer, earn more than
twice
as much as she does as a manager/director of a childcare center?” It wasn't simply that the married woman was
married
; it was that she was married to a man whose background was similar but whose wages were higher, in part because he worked in a male, and thus better paid, industry.

The problems of wage stagnation, pay inequality, unemployment, and social policies that presume women not to be breadwinners are often obscured beneath the persistent social and political calls to partner. Marriage, we are told repeatedly by our political leaders and pastors, will make it all okay.

Perhaps that's because this officially cheerful solution—going to the chapel and all that—is easier to talk about than the present stagnant economic climate and widening economic divide. In the decade
prior
to the economic collapse of 2008, the median family income dropped from $61,000 a year to $60,500;
¹²
even the privileged were graduating from college with mountains of debt and entering a parched job market. By 2012, two and a half million jobless adults were living with their parents.
¹³

These are the financial circumstances faced by the unprecedented number of unmarried women now making their financial way in the world.
And while it is not true that marriage is the answer, it is true that by simply living independently, they face an additional set of challenges in a world that remains designed with married Americans in mind. Single women foot more of their own bills, be they necessities like food and housing, or luxuries like cable and vacations; they pay for their own transportation. They do not enjoy the tax breaks or insurance benefits available to married couples. Sociologist Bella DePaulo has repeatedly pointed out that there are more than one thousand laws that benefit married people over single people.

According to
Atlantic
writers Christina Campbell and Lisa Arnold, “Marital privilege pervades nearly every facet of our lives.” They found that health, life, home, and car insurance all cost more for single people, and report that “It is not a federal crime for landlords to discriminate against potential renters based on their marital status.” Looking at income tax policy, Social Security, healthcare, and housing costs, Campbell and Arnold found that “in each category, the singles paid or lost more than the marrieds.” At some point in their calculations, the authors confess, “We each wanted to run out and get a husband, stat.”
¹⁴

While single women purchase their own homes at a higher rate than single men, when compared to married adults, the unmarried lag far behind married couples. According to
U.S. News & World Report
, single people have “the lowest income levels . . . asset levels . . . [and] home ownership rates compared to other family structures.”
¹⁵

Anita Hill, who, as a law professor, specializes in issues of housing inequality, argued that housing costs are among the biggest issues facing unmarried women. “We can decide that we're going to be single,” Hill said, “but we have to figure out how we're going to be able to put a roof over our heads. We're making eighty cents for every dollar a man makes. So there is a real issue with more and more women spending over 50 percent of their income on housing.” Economic forces, Hill said, push women “into less independent relationships.”

Even within wealthy populations, the economic advantages of solo working life for women begin to melt when those women have children, both with partners and on their own: When they are forced to take time away from work and divide their attention in ways that are both physically and emotionally demanding, in ways that society still doesn't expect parenthood to be demanding of men.

Women who are pregnant or have young children find it harder than childless workers to switch jobs, harder to get hired. Sociologist Shelley Correll did a study in which she submitted fake resumes for high-status jobs. When the resumes included clues that the female applicant was a parent, the applicant was only half as likely to receive a call back about the job.
¹⁶
Correll has found that women earn approximately five percent less per hour, per child, than their childless peers with comparable experience, while sociologist Joya Misra argues that motherhood is now a greater predictor of wage inequality than gender on its own.
¹⁷

The economic ramifications of having children are of course felt most keenly by unmarried mothers; a staggering 42 percent of people in families headed by single mothers live below the poverty line. One statistic bandied about in 2013 as evidence of how quickly women have advanced was a Pew Research Center finding about how nearly 40 percent of mothers are now the primary breadwinners in their families. But only 37 percent of those breadwinning mothers were women who out-earned husbands; this group enjoyed a median family income of $80,000. The rest—
63 percent
—were single mothers with a median family income of just $23,000.
¹⁸

Forty-eight percent of first births in the United States in 2013 were to unmarried women; for those who haven't finished high school, it was eighty-three percent.
¹⁹
About 60 percent of American women who have their first babies before they're thirty have them out of wedlock.
²⁰
Forty-one percent of
all
births are to unmarried women, a number that is four times what it was in 1970.
²¹

Both poverty and single motherhood have historically been racialized in the public imagination, in part thanks to Moynihan-era assumptions
about which Americans were having babies outside of marriage, and in part because the racialized Reagan-era caricaturing of so-called welfare queen black mothers has persisted as a talking point for people like Rick Santorum, who said in the 2012 campaign trail, “I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money.” And it's true that the country's history of racism and the multigenerational cycle of African-Americans being cut off from the kinds of economic securities—union-protected jobs, colleges, housing—that would allow them to build wealth has left a disproportionate number of blacks far more likely to be impoverished than their white counterparts.

However, the splintering of the American economy over the past forty years has diversified poverty, as well as the middle-income working classes, in which the incidence of unmarried motherhood is becoming most common. In 2000, around 22 percent of white households were run by single parents, the same percentage of black households that were single-parented when Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his report.
²²

Tim Casey, senior staff attorney at Legal Momentum and director of its Women & Poverty Program, says “There's this idea that all single mothers are black, which is not true.” Though it remains true that the rate of single parenthood is higher among black women than among Hispanic women, which is in turn higher than among white women, Casey points out, “There is a high fraction of single mothers in
all
racial groups. In fact, there is growth in single parenthood in all high-income countries. It's just the new reality.”

For their 2005 book,
Promises I Can Keep
, about poor single mothers, sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas spent years studying eight very low-income urban neighborhoods in Philadelphia and New Jersey, sampling Puerto Ricans, whites, and African-Americans. In a lecture at the University of Michigan, Edin said that there were only very slight distinctions between these groups: domestic violence was most common among whites and Puerto Ricans (in part because African-Americans in their study were less likely to live together); male incarceration rates were higher amongst African-Americans, unsurprisingly, given that the Bureau of Justice Statistics has estimated that nearly one-third of black men born at the turn of the century will be incarcerated at some point
in their lives; infidelity was equally common amongst the groups. Mostly, Edin said that she and Kefalas were “absolutely astonished at how few racial and ethnic differences we found.”
²³