Feminist Looking Glass

The official U.S. unemployment rate is 9.7 percent.  However, it is nearly 16 percent among African Americans and 12.4 percent among Hispanics.  The impact of those unemployment figures on unmarried African American and Hispanic women is particularly bad because their median “wealth” (assets minus debts) is an astoundingly low $100 for unmarried African American women and $120 for unmarried Hispanic women.   This compares to a median wealth of $41,000 for single white women.

On International Women’s Day, the Insight Center for Community Economic Development released a report titled “Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth and America’s Future.”  The report showed the vast differences in wealth according to gender and race.  First, for families, for every dollar of wealth owned by the typical white family, the typical family of color owns only 16 cents.

That is bad enough, but the gap is even worse for single women of color since the report found that nearly half of all single black and Hispanic women have zero or negative wealth, meaning that their debts exceed all their assets.  In addition, about a third of single Hispanic women and one-fourth of single black women have no checking or savings account.  And comparing the wealth of single women of color to single men of color shows further huge disparities.  Women of color own only a penny for every dollar of wealth owned by men of color of their same race.

The impact of the figures is shown even more clearly by comparing the numbers of African American women who are single.  42% of all African American women have never been married, which is double the number of white women.  And 70% of professional black women are single.

The result of these huge discrepancies shows, of course, that single women of color are the people most hurt when they lose their jobs.  When there is no wealth,” a person is working paycheck to paycheck.  This situation is so precarious that “just one unpaid sick day or appliance repair would send about half of them into debt.”  And the impact of losing a job, or not being able to find a job, can lead to complete financial ruin.  There is simply no way to make ends meet.

Filed under: Race/Ethnicity, Workplace Tagged: | Insight Center for Community Economic Development