The following research provided by Insanity House® speaks strongly to the need for supporting single parent women as they build their lives, their careers, and raise their children – our nations future. Research clearly shows that a good education does not necessarily translate to economic stability for the single parent women headed household. Eliminating the burden of educational debt does help.
Single Parent Women: General Stats
- 33% of all families in this country are single parent headed households.
- 85.1% of all custodial parents are women
- Single parent women are raising 20 million children under the age of 18.
- 31% of custodial mothers are divorced
- 31% have never married
- Only 11% are under the age of 25
- Less than 5% are teenage mothers
Single Parent Women : Economics
- The average household income for a single parent women is $24,000 annually.
- 41% of single parent households live at or below the poverty level.
- The poverty rate for single parent women is 20.4% while the national average is 12.7%.
- The median income for single parent women head of households with children under six years old is roughly 1/4 that of two parent households. (NSFH)
- $39 billion dollars is owed in back child support to 29 million children of single parent women. (2000 National Child Support Report)
- Only 24% of single parent households headed by women are receiving full child support payments, while 32% receive no child support at all.
- 32% of a single parent women’s weekly income is spent on childcare- this figure nearly doubles when more than one child needs day care.
Financial strain is one of the strongest predictors of depression and crisis in a family unit, regardless of the family structure.
Children have replaced the elderly as the primary victims of poverty in the U.S.
The major causes of poverty in single parent women headed households are 1) the inability to be awarded and effectively receive child support, and 2) lower wage rates for jobs and careers that are traditional fields (helping and teaching professions) that women enter into.
Working Mothers Stats
- Nearly 60% of full-time working American women who work year round get paid less than @25,000 a year. (Amazoncastle.com)
- 78% of all single parent women are employed (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
- 45.4% of all single parent women have multiple jobs. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)
- 47% work fulltime year round, while 32% work either part time or part of the year, usually while going to school.
- Sleep, self-time, and chores are among the top things working mothers forgo to spend time with their children. (University of Maryland Study)
- While the hourly wage for women without children is 90% of men’s hourly wages, the comparable figure for women with children is 70%. (Womensnews.org)
- In 49 states the average annual cost of child care exceeds the annual cost of public college tuition. (National Association of Working Women)
- Single parent women experience the highest rate of unemployment, and receive the lowest rate of pay regardless of their education.
If single working mothers earned as much as comparable men, their family incomes would increase by nearly 17% and their poverty rates would be cut in half, from 25.3% to 12.6%. (AFL-CIO, Institute for Women’s Policy Research)
Single Parent Women: Education Stats
- 59% of single parent women continue on with higher levels of education over 46% of their married women counterparts.
- Single parent women are more likely to choose and enter careers in the helping and teaching professions because they are child centric. These professions require higher levels of education and pay the lowest salaries.
- Since 1984, the number of women in Graduate school has exceeded the number of men. (National Center for Education Statistics, 1997)
- In 1998, 41.1% of women versus 25.8% of men reported using their own resources to finance their doctoral education. (National Science Foundation)
- In the past five years more than 10 million women have enrolled in Adult Education Classes sponsored under the Adult Education Act. (US Department of Education)
- Women make up almost 40% of the full-time faculty at public colleges, but only 20% of positions at top ranked public and private research institutions. (Women’s Research and Education Institute)