Women's eNews (https://womensenews.org/tag/social-security/page/2/)
The Supreme Court heard an age – discrimination case Monday brought by a woman who lost her job at 51. Even though more men file such complaints women are more likely to need jobs when they are older and could have more at stake.
The first baby boomer to file for Social Security was a woman, highlighting women’s greater dependence on the precariously balanced retirement program. So far ’08 candidates are not singling out the “retirement gap” for special attention.
Molly Ginty spent a day interviewing a local prostitute and her American client while boating off the coast of Thailand, a nation where as many as 2.8 million sex workers serve the tourist trade. She found the scales of their partnership off balance.
(WOMENSENEWS)–CheersThe British government plans to offer all caregivers, mostly women, weekly financial credits to equal the payments they would have made into the state pension fund had they been in the labor force, The Guardian reported on March 14. A new proposal would recognize the contributions of female caregivers who leave or never enter the work force, and, as result, are left with a meager cushion of pension funds when they retire.In Britain today, only 30 percent of women who reach official retirement age are eligible to receive full pension benefits. The average woman receives 70 percent of the pension, which the government says is not enough for the 10 million women that survive on that amount. John Hutton, the United Kingdom’s work and pensions secretary, is hoping the new plan will change that.”As modern life becomes increasingly more diverse–and men and women alike bring up children and caring for family and friends–this could be a win for men as well,” Hutton said.The government estimates that currently 2.2 million women living in the United Kingdom are not accruing the full basic state pension and 600,000 of them fall below the lowest earnings threshold.More News to Cheer This Week:An annual study comparing the academic performance of male and female athletes in the NCAA women’s and men’s basketball tournament teams revealed that female players do better academically and have higher graduation rates than male athletes, and that the gap between white and African American female players is smaller than the same gap for males. The March 15 report showed that 95 percent of women’s teams surveyed graduated at least 50 percent of their players, 31 percent higher than the men’s teams. The graduation gap was also affected by race: on women’s teams, whites had a 19 percent higher rate than African Americans, while on men’s teams, the gap was 33 percent.
Morocco is about to join the short list of Arab countries that enable both parents to confer citizenship on their children. Activists are still pressing to eliminate exceptions in the proposed law.
Female Democrats lay down the gauntlet on Social Security yesterday. They depicted the president’s privatization plan–which includes cuts to survivor and disabled benefits–as an assault on women that they were ready to fight.
The Social Security debate is all wrong. Instead of asking whether it should be saved or shelved, Kristin Maschka says we should be looking for ways to update a system that does a disservice to women, particularly those who are caretakers.
Women live longer, earn less and fill more caretaking roles than men. For all these reasons they have a lot to lose if Social Security is changed, says economist Heather Boushey. So who would win? Wall Street brokers spring to her mind.
As the public debate intensifies over the Bush administration’s drive to privatize Social Security, women have a special stake in the outcome. Sixty percent of recipients are women and for a quarter of all women over 65, the program is their only income.
Women ignore the debate on proposed Social Security privatization at their peril. Nearly three-fourths of 85-year-old Social Security recipients are female and women are twice as likely as men to spend their later years in poverty.