Читать книгу Counseling the Contemporary Woman - Suzanne Degges-White - Страница 14

Social class and socioeconomic status are closely connected to gender in a variety of ways. Regardless of life choice across single, married/partnered, or divorced status, women navigate education, employment outside of the home, and caretaking differently than men. Women and children are significantly overrepresented in poverty statistics, with 31.6 percent of women-headed households below federal poverty level compared with 15.8 percent of male-headed households (U.S. Census Bureau, 2014). Women are also disproportionately impacted by divorce, contributing to the “feminization of poverty” as women are most frequently custodial parents, bearing the brunt of the caretaking and financial responsibility for children. Even for those in heterosexual, two-parent households, discrepancies appear in parent perspectives of responsibilities. A national survey found that fathers are more likely to view parenting responsibilities as equally shared, while mothers say they take on a larger role (Pew Research Center, 2015b). Women who choose to be mothers may experience challenges negotiating career advancement and gendered caretaking expectations of children and older relatives. In addition, women are frequently socialized into lower-paying occupations (e.g., nurses instead of physicians, teachers instead of administrators), despite surpassing men’s rates of bachelor’s degree completion by age 31 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018). Further, the absence of equal pay contributes to lower overall earnings for women compared to men. This is further complicated by racial disparities in which black and Hispanic women’s median earnings in 2018 were between $163 and $200 lower than white women’s median earnings, while Asian women’s earnings were higher than all groups, due to educational attainment (Hegewisch & Hartmann, 2019). Thus, examining inequity through a single lens of race or gender fails to encompass the complexity of wage discrepancies.