Welcome to the final stage of life- retirement and legacy!
As you consider these statistics, think about how they could not only affect your character, but any beneficiaries that your character may have ,and how that general impact can snowball.
Female same-sex couples have a median retirement savings of $66,000, 25% less than opposite-sex couples. Add discrimination and wage disparity between men and women, and gay women have far less at the time of retirement. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2016/03/06/lgbt-retirement-hurdles/81328172/
Poverty rates for women rise over 5% with age: 8.6 percent among women aged 65 to 69 to 13.5 percent among women aged 80 or older, and is tied with their family circumstances. The poverty rate for women 80 or older was 4.3% for women who were married, 13.9% widows, 15.8% divorced women, and 21.5 percent women who never married. In every marital status group, women with children had higher poverty rates than women without children, a pattern that does not hold the same for men. https://www.brookings.edu/essay/how-does-gender-equality-affect-women-in-retirement/#:~:text=In%202020%2C%20average%20life%20expectancy,less%20per%20year%20than%20men
Caregiving effects income into retirement. A 2017 Boston College study found that a woman with one child earns 28 percent less on average over her career than a woman without children, partially as a result of time out of the workforce. Becoming a father typically does not reduce a cis-man’s earnings. Each additional child reduces average women’s earnings by another 3 percent, leaving women with less to retire on, especially if they never married or became divorced or widowed.
Women are also more likely than men to care for their aging parents—a responsibility that predominantly falls on women over the age of 50. People who leave the labor force early to care for a parent or other elderly relative lose an average of $142,000 in wages. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3048891
Women of color have less to retire on than their white counterparts. A 2020 Pew Research report found that while 52% of Americans have some investments in the stock market through retirement accounts, only 31% of non-Latinx Black and 28% of Latinx households own some stocks, compared to the 61% non-Latinx white households. Many women of color work in industries that don’t provide them with employer offered saving plans, retirement plans, or they are not paid enough to build wealth. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/03/25/more-than-half-of-u-s-households-have-some-investment-in-the-stock-market/
Women are still only paid an average of 82 cents for every dollar that men make. On average, men collected $1,627 per month in Social Security in 2018, versus $1,297 per month for women https://www.investopedia.com/retirement-savings-by-gender-5100948
Average earnings for transgender women fell by approximately 32% after transitioning. https://www.investopedia.com/retirement-savings-by-gender-5100948
Gender disparities throughout their careers lead women to receive Social Security benefits that are, on average, 80% of what men receive. With racial inequality – Census data shows that Black women make 64 cents on the dollar compared to their white male colleagues—and women of color have even less of a liveable income to save for retirement. Black and Latina women typically are paid 64 cents and 57 cents, respectively, for every dollar that a white, non-Hispanic male makes. And this gender wage gap carries into retirement, with women over 65 receiving only 83 cents in retirement income for every dollar that men in the same age bracket receive. https://nwlc.org/the-pandemic-widens-the-retirement-gender-gap/#:~:text=Black%20and%20Latina%20women%20typically,the%20same%20age%20bracket%20receive.
The economic impacts of the pandemic from lost income are widespread, but women were more likely to be laid off or furloughed during the COVID-19 crisis. Gender pay disparities, time out of the workforce and disproportionate caregiving responsibilities for elders and children were longstanding challenges to women’s retirement preparedness prior to the onset of the pandemic. https://www.plansponsor.com/pandemic-hurt-womens-retirement-confidence/