Читать книгу Financial Adulting - Ashley Feinstein Gerstley - Страница 33

Then there's the gender wealth gap. Women own $0.32 for every $1.00 a white man owns. This gap is far greater for women of color. Black women and Latinas own $0.02 and $0.01, respectively, for the white man's dollar. $0.01!

The Gender and Racial Wealth Gap

Source: Data from Women and Wealth—Insights for Grantmakers. Asset Funders Network, 2015.

Where does this come from? Our personal finances are all interconnected. Each area of our money lives impacts each of the other areas. The wage gap combined with the pink tax (see Chapter 5) requires women to take out more debt. Even when women have the same credit profile as men, they pay higher interest rates (discrimination). This all leads to women investing less and buying less real estate (and the mortgages cost more for women when they do).

Then there's intersectionality, a term coined by lawyer and civil rights activist Kimberlé Crenshaw. Women of color, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, and mothers experience these gaps in a compounding way. Kimberlé describes intersectionality as “a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other.”¹⁸ Yes, there is inequality based on gender identity, race/ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation, but many people are subject to some or all of these inequalities, not just one, and there's a cumulative effect.

Wait, you might be wondering why I included motherhood. A large part of the pay gap is due to motherhood. What? Mothers earn less for the same work than fathers do, experience workplace discrimination, and are pushed out of the workforce due to the lack of childcare and corporate support of parents, and this not only impacts their lifetime income but also their ability to invest, their access to retirement accounts, and their need to take on debt.

Not to mention, women live longer, which means they need more money in order to retire. It's enough to make you scream.