Women More Likely to Suffer Money Anxiety, Polls Find

Women are far more worried about their finances than men, and rightfully so, given their reduced likelihood of having a company pension, two surveys issued Thursday show.

Women are half as likely as men to receive an employer-provided pension, and those who do receive one will get half as much on average as men, according to a survey by the Women’s Research and Education Institute.

Meanwhile, Money magazine’s annual “Americans and Their Money” poll found that women worry more about finances, have a gloomier economic outlook and are more likely to think about money than sex.

More than half the women surveyed said they would have trouble paying an unexpected $1,000 bill, compared with a third of men, according to the Money poll. Women earn an average of 76 cents for each dollar earned by men, according to the magazine. In the survey, only one in five said they earn what they deserve, compared with nearly one in three men (29%).

Labor Secretary Robert Reich, describing the pension situation as the “glass ceiling of retirement security,” said the country must do “everything possible to end this de facto penalty on working mothers.”

Reich commented at a National Press Club luncheon for the Women’s Research and Education Institute, which released the sixth edition of its series of reports on the status of U.S. women.

The pension study says women continue to bear most of the responsibility for child care and that more single working mothers are living in poverty than ever before.

It also illuminated the host of circumstances causing pension inequity.

Although the earnings gap between men and women has narrowed, women continue to earn less than men, and they move in and out of the labor market more frequently, which results in lower pensions.

Women change jobs after an average of 4.8 years, according to the report. That means they often don’t qualify for employer-provided retirement plans, which usually require five to seven years of service.

In addition, more women than men hold part-time jobs or work for employers that don’t provide for their retirement, the report said.

The end result: Women compose nearly half the work force, yet nearly two out of three working women--or 24 million--don’t have pension plans. In 1989, women with benefits as retired employees collected an average annual benefit of $4,330--less than half the $9,460 men received.

Reich said those data are another example of how society “cannot and should not separate family values from economic values.”

“Allowing the retirement security of women to diminish because they have taken responsibility for bearing and rearing their children is wrong for women, wrong for families and wrong for America.”

The Money magazine poll also found that a gender gap divided the sexes over personal finances, the national economy and presidential politics--a chasm sociologists and financial planners say reflects the different treatment women receive in the workplace and at home.

“Women were more downbeat than men on almost every issue relating to their own finances and to the economy,” said Adam Richard, senior vice president of Willard & Shullman, the Greenwich, Conn.-based polling firm that conducted the survey for the magazine.

Sixty percent of women said they think more about money than sex, compared with 34% of men. Nearly a third of women said they often fret over money, compared with 17% of men. And 24% of women expect the United States will face a serious recession soon, compared with 16% of men.

“That’s because [women are] poorer,” said Kim Voss, a sociology professor at UC Berkeley. “If you’re already feeling insecure, you’re also concerned about the future.”

The mail-in Money magazine survey was conducted in February and March. It included responses from 1,218 household decision-makers and had a margin or error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.