Why women are more likely than men to face poverty after retirement

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"I've had jobs that included a 401(k) and I was able to put some money aside, every month," she says. "But then I would get laid off and have to cash out the 401(k) to have money to live on."

Born and raised in Detroit, Hall is divorced and doesn't have any children. She works part time as a file clerk. She and her siblings pitch in to care for their 75-year old mother. Hall says she tries not to think about what her situation will be like at that age.

"My bills are current, I have food," she says, "but I'm still living paycheck to paycheck, if it wasn't for Section 8 (a housing subsidy), I don't know where I'd be living."

Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security at the National Women's Law Center, says "the solution to the retirement (funding) crisis starts with the earnings and wage gap."


Women are more likely to report that Social Security is the biggest source of income -- 50 percent to 38 percent for men, according to a recent poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Women are 14 percentage points less likely to say they will receive a pension.


"The bulk of stay-at-home moms are not these high income, well-educated women that you read about," she says.

Over a 40-year career, the pay gap between men and women adds up to an average of $430,480, according to the Census Bureau. For minorities and women of color, the number is much higher.

"If we are talking about a 65-year-old black woman, she was born before desegregation," says Karen Lincoln, a professor at the University of Southern California and director of a center for geriatric social work.

"This has a huge impact on things like the quality of education they receive, the employment opportunities available to them, and their ability to accumulate wealth," Lincoln says.

Lincoln points to additional census data showing African-American women are paid 64 percent of what white men get, compared with 54 percent for Hispanic and Latina women. In addition to making less, women are much more likely to be single parents, putting additional economic strains on them. In 2013, almost 83 percent of custodial parents were mothers, according to the census.



"The poverty rate is a deceptive number, it doesn't reflect the money they (men and women) need to actually exist," says Jennifer Brown, manager of research at the National Institute on Retirement Security.


"Those increases in longevity come with huge increases in medical costs," Brown says. "Especially if you're talking about things like long-term care or treatment for mental disabilities such as dementia and Alzheimer's."


In 2016, the census poverty threshold for a single person is $11,880. According to UCLA's Elder Index, a measure of the cost for housing, food, transport and health care, for a 65-year-old renter shows that the base cost for these needs is $24,024 and growing.