Report Shows Vast Wealth Disparity for Minority Women

There is a tendency to compartmentalize struggles for equality into distinct groups, but too often, it's the bigger picture that really demands our attention. When it comes to wealth, it's not just a struggle for women who come in second to men, it's about race, poverty, and the women of color who are coming in dead last.

Discussions of women's rights, feminism, and equality often revert back to a discussion of wages, and women lament making less than 80 cents to a man's $1. While noting wage disparities is important, there should be two caveats. The first is that averages can be misleading. The second is the need to pay attention to both income and wealth. While income refers to what you earn, wealth is a measure of your total assets (your car, house, bank account, etc.) minus your debts (credit card debt, mortgage, etc.).

A new report, “Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America’s Future,” released this week by the  Insight Center for Community Economic Development focuses on the wealth statistics of women of color, particularly single women. As it turns out, simple averages of incomes don't tell the whole story. These numbers hide the vast inequalities that exist between white women and women of color.

Racialicious's Latoya Peterson is covering the report in a series that stresses the experience of women of color. As the numbers show, what may seem like shocking news to some is a fact of life for the staggering number of women of color who suffer crippling economic hardships. "All this time I’ve been wondering why I can’t get my shit together," reflected one of Peterson's friends, "but it turns out I’m normal.”

Here are some of the shocking numbers: The median wealth for single white women, ages 36 to 49, is $42,600. The median wealth for single women of color in the same age bracket is $5. (Not a typo.) When you expand the age bracket for single women of color, the numbers improve slightly: black women have a median wealth of $100; Hispanic women, $120. The same median for a white woman clocks in at $41,500, quadruple the wealth of non-white men.

In other words, "single black and Hispanic women have one penny of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by their male counterparts and a tiny fraction of a penny for every dollar of wealth owned by white women." This kind of crushing inequality is something all feminists should be discussing.

The report is really a must-read, but this chart caught my eye:

Basically, when you talk about income disparity, as we feminists are wont to do, it creates the illusion that all men make more then all women. But as this chart shows, the highest income discrepancy is between white men and white women, even though white women are the second highest earners behind their male counterparts. This does not mean that the gender income gap is not a serious problem, it simply means that it is largest among the most privileged where the wealth in this country is concentrated.

If feminists started throwing around some new numbers about wealth, race, and gender, it might go further towards highlighting not only the injustices visited upon white women in the work place, but women of color as they struggle to amass any wealth in our increasingly immobile society.

Photo: ctrouper's photostream