Reading Room

Below are the results of a Personal Survey on Social Security and Medicare Benefits, conducted in January 2017 with members of Eleanor’s Hope. Approximately 1,400 surveys were tabulated.

Any worker who delays claiming Social Security receives a larger monthly benefit due to the actuarial adjustment. Some claimants – particularly women, who are more likely to take time out of the labor force early in their careers – can further increase their benefits if the extra years of work raise their career average earnings by displacing lower-earning years. This study uses the Health and Retirement Study linked to earnings records to quantify the impact of women’s late-career earnings on Social Security benefits relative to men’s. It also compares the impact on women, depending on their marital status and education.

When employers force their employees with caregiving duties to choose between work and family, everyone loses. This can be particularly true for women, who still make up 60 percent of the family caregiver population (though men are increasingly shouldering the responsibility).

The party looks to Kamala Harris, Catherine Cortez Masto, Tammy Duckworth and Maggie Hassan to help lead it out of the abyss.

Women of New York, rejoice. You have the smallest gender pay gap of all 50 states, earning 89 cents for every dollar your male peers make. This may hardly seem like good news—until you see the numbers for Wyoming. Nicknamed the Equality State, with “Equal Rights” as its motto, Wyoming is a place where it doesn’t pay very much to be a woman—in fact, it only pays 64 cents for every man’s dollar, the worst in the U.S.