Stater Home Page

Department of Communication

A recent 2000 census survey found that Ohio women earn far less money than Ohio men and less, on average, than most women in America.

Cause for concern: women who are single mothers and the sole provider for their families account for 25 percent of women and the numbers are rising. Experts fear that more families will fall into poverty.

Wornie Reed, professor of sociology and urban studies and former director of the Urban Research Center, says, “Children of single mothers are at a disadvantage because over half of them are living in poverty.” The poverty level is a yearly income of less than $15,000 for a family of four.

This leads to more significant problems: “These children are 60 percent more likely to die before the age of 1 because they comprise 80 percent of low birth-weight babies,” Reed says.

He said most poor mothers do not have health insurance and many of them do not receive child support.

“These children also are twice as likely to repeat a grade and 3.5 times more likely to be expelled from school,” Reed notes.

It becomes a vicious cycle because a child that grows up poor and does not do well in school is poor his or her whole life and their children grow up the same way, he adds.

What can be done to break this cycle? Reed says, “A big problem that occurred when then-President Clinton took away welfare for many single moms was that they lost their health in-surance.” Fortunately, in Ohio, many of these wo-men are receiving state-funded Medicaid, he explains. Adding another problem is the dilemma of finding and paying for adequate child care, as well as obtaining market-able skills.

To strengthen families, Ohio needs to confront one of the worst economic gender gaps in the nation, says Mareyjoyce Green, director of the Women’s Comprehensive Program at Cleveland State Uni-versity.

Green says lawmakers need to support aid to part-time college students, who disproportionately tend to be women, and companies need to have training programs for women new to the work force.

In a recent survey of the American population, the U.S. Census Bureau found that working women in Ohio earned a median income of $17,873 in 2000. That’s $13,407 less than the median income of Ohio men, which stood at $31,280, and $1,123 less than the median income of women nationally. Nearly 30 percent of Ohio women earn less than $10,000 a year.

According to the census bureau, men have always made more than women, partly because they play a steadier role in the workplace: working women may leave their careers to have a baby or to tend to their families.

At times, income disparity can be blamed on unequal pay for equal work, but perhaps more damaging is the fact that women are funneled into low-wage jobs, or tradi-tional “women’s work,” such as office and administrative support, service jobs, healthcare support, and food pre-paration, according to the 2000 Census Bureau survey.

Men, meanwhile, domi-nate higher-paying union-ized fields like con-struction and trucking.

Women earning less than men find education the greatest equalizer. “Get-ting a college degree is their greatest hope of be-coming better prepared for the workplace and better able to negotiate higher pay,” Reed says.

“Another way these moms can make a difference is to vote. Compared to seniors who have a high vote rate, poor single working mothers are less likely to receive money from the federal government, and are more likely to have their programs cut,” he said.

Top of Page