Young Single Women Close the Income Gap: Celebrate With Perspective

It's all over my news feed: young single women in urban areas now make more money than their single male counterparts. Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and numerous other outlets recently reported that unmarried, childfree women aged 22 to 30 earn eight percent more than men of equivalent status, according to the research firm Reach Advisors.

Partial yay!

Partial, because it would be nicer if the sexes earned the same amount. Young single women are more likely than the men to have attended college, putting them in a higher earning bracket, while at the same time less educated men are losing jobs due to the recession and associated "decimation of the manufacturing employment base" that previously provided them with well-paying jobs, according to USA Today.

So let's not break out the champagne yet. Single, young, childfree urban women, while an important demographic, are only one slice of the female populace, a populace that overall still earns far less than men. Single women -- not necessarily of the young, childfree, urban persuasion -- still earn less than married women. They still suffer particularly hard from the recession, as reported by Afro and The Huffington Post, in part because government and commerce perpetuate policies that force singles to subsidize married people, and also because the gender gap tends to hit harder on women of all ages who do not have a (normally higher-earning) male's income to fall back on. Women of color, who statistically and historically speaking start from a baseline of less privilege, feel the gap more acutely and have the most to gain from its obliteration.

So while the news that young, single, childfree women are earning more than before is great, I don't want the wide media reportage and confetti-throwing to obscure the work still to be done -- including by single women themselves. In 2008, only 70% of eligible single women voters were actually registered, which means that at least 16 million women's voices were not heard in those elections, bemoans Page Gardner of The Huffington Post.\

All single women of various stripes need to stand up for ourselves together. At twenty-five percent of the U.S. adult population, we are a growing group with increasing potential. For example, single women are buying twice as many homes as single men, and we also played a crucial role in putting Obama into office.

Yet policymakers treat us like protective parents do teenagers, not wanting us to grow up, even though they can't stop us. So while we celebrate the economic rise of the young/single/childfree woman, let's also keep fighting.

Photo credit: Library of Congress, Remington Typewriter Company