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Income for women
age 65 and older is typically 25 percent lower than income for
men of the same age, the Washington, D.C.-based National
Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS) said in a report
released on Tuesday.
Men's income is 44 percent more than women's income by age 80 or
older, it said.
"The fact that women over 65 are 80 percent more likely than men
to fall into poverty in their retirement years is tragic and
should be a call to action for policymakers," Diane Oakley,
executive director of the NIRS non-profit research center and
co-author of the report, said in a statement.
Analyzing U.S. Census Bureau data, the researchers found women
ages 75 to 79 are three times more likely than men to live in
poverty, and widowed women are twice as likely to live in
poverty than widowed men.
"Women are financially disadvantaged because we still earn less
than men and we typically take time out of our careers for care
giving - both of which reduce our ability to prepare for
retirement," Oakley said.
Women also need a bigger nest egg for retirement because they
tend to live longer than men, she said.
Lifetime earnings affect the amounts of U.S. government Social
Security benefits, pension income and retirement savings, and in
the United States, women earn 79 percent of what men earn doing
the same work, the report noted.
The NIRS called for increases in Social Security benefits and
cost-of-living adjustments, and in eligibility for part-time
workers in employer-sponsored retirement plans. It also called
for the development of retirement savings plans by U.S. states.
(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst, editing by Alisa Tang. Please
credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of
Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights,
trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit
http://news.trust.org)
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