Thoughts on this article? Also, what are the stats on gender and poverty (especially child poverty)?

Oncefa2 · 2020-02-27T12:22:28+00:00

I actually thought the difference was higher than that.

More men obviously are homeless. I think poverty usually effects men more (in terms of severity) because they have fewer support groups, non profits, and government programs to help them.

This isn't true though:

Women are paid less than men, even when they have the same qualifications and work the same hours

The earrings gap in the United States is entirely explained by differences in working hours between men and women. Women sometimes even earn more than men on an hourly basis.

You can see how they justify saying this though:

Women who work full time earn only 77 percent of what men make—a 22 percent gap in average annual wages

"Full time" has a very specific legal definition. It's somewhere between 30 hours and 40 hours a week (I think 33.5 hours qualifies as "full time"). If you grab annual income and hours worked for any given year, the earnings difference is usually 0. There was a poster on MensRights who ran the numbers recently for either 2018 or 2019 and women actually earned more than men on an hourly basis that year.

There's also a graph going around that shows hourly income by gender all the way back to like 1970, and there's essentially no difference in pay, with women commonly outearning men over entire decades.

Lots of these women work fewer hours out of choice and many have their incomes subsidized by welfare, child support, or a boyfriend / husband. Many therefore are considered to be living in poverty only as a technicality. They likely have enough money coming in from other sources that would put them over the poverty line. And because men are the ones who often pay them, many men are actually living in poverty but not counted in these statistics.

These forms of "financial assistance" that women receive actually incentivises them to work less. For example, why would you become an engineer and dedicate yourself to your career when you can simply marry a hard working engineer instead? Especially if your goal in life is to become a mom, and you know you can find a man who will help pay you to work fewer hours than him.

In many ways, the wage gap is an indicator of financial privilege that women have. Or rather, the privilege to not have to work as much and be able to stay home more.

Of course many are raising kids as single moms and this is certainly an issue that I see worthy of tackling (giving men equal child custody here would help) but to act like it's caused by discrimination, and not the life choices of men and women, is simply dishonest. I won't even call it "wrong" or "false" anymore; it's dishonest, and anyone who says this ought to be called out for it.

After all, last I checked, having kids is entirely optional. And if you do any research, you'll find that it's moms who overwhelmingly fill this demographic (in part because having dependents raises the criteria for "poverty" and in part because they work less to "take care of their kids"). What's even more interesting is that single fathers are significantly less likely to work part time and live in poverty. Which proves that even after they have kids, that tendency to earn less is largely a choice that they have made.

And as a fun side note: children raised by single fathers tend to be better off than children raised by single moms. It turns out that having a parent dedicating to providing a life for you and keeping you out of poverty is more important than the extra time that children spend with their parents when they work fewer hours. It's sad that parents have to make this choice but if you love and care for your children, you'll make those sacrifices to work longer, harder hours to keep them out of poverty. Many women use their children as an excuse to work less, and then turn around and blame the pay gap on their problems. Like I'm sorry, but if you want to be a mom, maybe you ought to plan ahead and go into a higher paying career field in order to fund that choice. Don't use it as a cop-out (you could argue that we should subsidize parents more, and I'd agree, but I still think this is the wrong attitude to have... don't blame the system and play the victim card when you already know how it works ahead of time).

BannanasAreEvil · 2020-02-27T17:44:02+00:00

Actually the stats they give show the opposite is true, men are actually poorer than women. If you look at the breakdown in the "Family composition of household" all the information needed is right there.

To start the stat says 13.8% of women are poor and 11.1% of males were poor.

54% are single women with no children (6.9% of the total)
8% Married women with no children, so these men are poor as well (1.05% of the total)
12% Married women with dependant children, so these men are poor as well (1.66% of the total)
26% Single women with dependant children (3.58% of the total)

So we remove the statistics that make men just as poor as women by removing all married stats as those would equal out. So 54% of women who are poor are by themselves and another 26% of them have a dependant child. Having a "Dependant" changes your poverty status. Remove that stat and and men are actually poorer then women since 25% of that 13% is made by single mothers.(and lets not forget this does not count men incarcerated or homeless)

Poverty Levels

13,000 a year for a single person
17,000 a year for a single person with a child

So 1/4 of the women who are impoverished could be earning more than a man but since they have a dependant it pushes them below the man as far as poverty goes. So if 1 guy is making 13,600 a year and a woman with a child is making 17k a year she will be listed as poverty and he will not.

What this chart does not show is all the social programs available to those single mothers that push them above the poverty line that the man does not get. For instance SNAP could give a total of $250 a month in food assistance, thats an extra 3k a year. They can also get housing assistance and that can range from 600-1000 a month so lets say only 6k a year. Suddenly the single mother has an accumulated income of 26k a year, double what the man was getting but she is still considered poverty.

Lets also not forget that Child Support is not taxed and therefore not included as income! So a single mother earning 17k at her job, receiving 250 a month in SNAP, an additional 500 a month towards housing and getting a child support check for $200 a month is considered poor (with a total of 28,400 in resources). While the guy making 14k a year and having to pay 200 a month in child support but not getting those same benefits is not considered poor, since he actually only gets 11,600.

So basically we need to just take the 54% of the single women as the only segment that is actually poor. That means only 6.9% of women are considered in poverty and men are 9.6%. That by itself is alarming since men are about 30% more in poverty then women and those figures do not count the vast amount of homeless men dying in the streets.

Title	Thoughts on this article? Also, what are the stats on gender and poverty (especially child poverty)?
Author	Strikester101
Upvotes	4
Comments	4
Date	February 27, 2020 10:47 AM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/faabk2/thoughts_on_this_article_also_what_are_the_stats/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/thoughts-on-this-article-also-what-are-the-stats.1063957 https://theredarchive.com/post/1063957

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