In honor of Women's History Month, the White House released a report on the status of women entitled, Women in America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being (PDF).
According to The New York Times, "White House officials concede there is nothing new in the report. Rather, it is a compilation of data that paints a statistical portrait of changes in the social and economic lives of women over the past several decades."
In fact, the most interesting thing about the report may be its very existence-- It is the first comprehensive federal report on the status of women since Eleanor Roosevelt convinced President Kennedy to produce a similar report almost 50 years ago.
While the release of Women in America seems more symbolic than substantive, it does include some interesting bits:
- Women are marrying later and having fewer children than in the past. Women also give birth to their first child at older ages.
- Women are more likely to live in poverty than adult men. Single-mother families face significantly higher poverty rates, often because of the lower wages earned by women in these families.
- Today, younger women are more likely to graduate from college than are men and are more likely to hold a graduate school degree. Still, women earned only about 75 percent of what their male counterparts earned in 2009.
- Workforce participation among men has declined, but women are still less likely to work in the paid labor force. When women do work, they are much more likely than men to work part-time.
If you don't feel like reading the full report, you can check out highlights* provided by the Council on Women and Girls.
Happy Women's History Month!
*The report is divided into five categories: people, families and income; education; employment; health; and crime and violence
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