Older women workers face significant financial hurdles: report

By Kathleen Steele Gaivin

On January 31, 2024

Women aged 55 or more years face significant financial hurdles, according to a recent report from the Center for American Progress.

“Protections against age discrimination, enhanced workforce supports, and a higher minimum wage are needed to advance equity for older women,” according to the report. “The ability to advance one’s career toward increasingly higher-paid work and better conditions, either by switching jobs or advancing within one’s current job, is an important personal and policy goal not subject to an arbitrary expiration date.”

Women in the workplace often find their mid- and late-career prospects hindered by long-standing inequities based on their gender and age, as well as lack of access to training, the report authors wrote, adding that women’s career trajectories often are sidelined at some point by caregiving responsibilities.

“Earnings for full-time women workers tend to peak at earlier ages and stagnate or decline more rapidly with age compared with those for men. This pattern can be explained to some extent by young mothers working slightly fewer hours than women without children or men,” the report noted. “But over time, the more significant drivers appear to be women’s overrepresentation in occupations with short career ladders and underrepresentation at higher rungs in career ladders where they do exist.”

The report noted occupational segregation as a hurdle for women in the workplace as they are sorted into a narrow range of often low-paid jobs. Older women, according to the report, are often funneled off into low-paid jobs than younger women.

Outright age discrimination exists in the workplace, even with federal protections, the authors said.

“Although illegal, age discrimination remains pervasive and has outsize impacts on women. Age discrimination limits older women’s career advancement and often intersects with other forms of discrimination based on gender, race, disability and more,” they wrote.

Additionally, according to the report, older women are not often offered the same opportunities as their male counterparts for training, upskilling and reskilling, which could help them boost their earnings.

A survey previously reported on by the McKnight’s Business Daily, from nonprofit Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies in collaboration with Transamerica Institute, noted that women are less likely than men to have sufficient savings for retirement. Lower earnings over the years affect women’s retirement savings, translating into lower Social Security benefits and less retirement savings.

This piece was republished from McKnights Senior Living.