Women spend an average of 11.5 years out of the workforce care-giving for children or elderly parents. The number of adults ages 45-60 online will swell from 80 million today to 157 million by 2003. Because they live longer, women are more likely to outlive their assets. Divorced women spend more on apparel and retirement. Never-married women allocate more to cash contributions and insurance.
Widowed women allocate more towards housing, food, and health.
Women 45 and older are far more likely than their male counterparts to suffer from disabling health conditions, face discrimination in the workplace, fall into poverty, and serve as caregivers to disabled family members, often at great cost to their own health and economic security. Social Security Most aged Social Security recipients are women. Social Security has lowered the poverty rate for elderly women. Without Social Security, more than half of elderly women would be living in poverty. However, even with Social Security, older women are nearly twice as likely as older men to be poor.