Gender poverty gap grows with age
Being old and female means you’re more likely to be poor than a man, census shows
Women face economic disadvantages throughout their lifetimes, but it is near the end of their lives that it is most acute.
Nowhere is that more evident than in Metro Vancouver, which has Canada’s highest percentage of people living in low-income households. The 2016 census data for the region indicates that the percentage of women living in low-income households is 7.5 per cent higher than men. But past the age of 65? The percentage of poor women jumps to 15.8 per cent.
“This is structural patriarchy,” says Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s city program, who put the census poverty numbers through a gender lens. “The entire experience of doing this has taught me we have to view things through a gender lens. If you want to do something in terms of policy, you have to understand the cleavages in society, and age and gender are two of them.”
The reasons for the gendered poverty gap range from the facts that women live longer, earn an average of 25 per cent less throughout their lives than men and often take time away from the workplace to have children and are able to contribute less to pension plans and retirement funds. Among the oldest of today’s seniors, married women were much less likely to have done paid work outside the home, while the high mortality rates during the Second World War meant many women never married.
Across Metro, 16.5 per cent of seniors live below the lowincome threshold of $22,133 in after-tax income for a single or $31,201 for a couple. The largest concentration of poor seniors is in Vancouver, which alone has 19,115 of them.
Break it down by gender, and across the region 17.6 per cent of poor seniors are women compared with 15.2 per cent of men. But that gap widens substantially in some municipalities.
In Langley, one in four senior women live in poverty. In White Rock, one in six senior women are poor. But the gap between poor female and male elders is seven percentage points.
In Vancouver, the gender gap is less than one per cent, which still means there are nearly 11,500 more poor elderly women than men. In Chinatown, Gastown and the Downtown Eastside, 71 per cent of poor seniors are women.
“They’re out on the streets, binning for survival,” Yan says.
The small, wealthy enclaves of Belcarra, Anmore and Lion’s Bay are outliers. Not only is the prevalence of low-income households a third or less than the regional average, they are the only places where more men live in low-income households. In Belcarra, all of the 6.3 per cent of seniors living in low-income households are men.
In many ways, the results are unsurprising. But they are disturbing — especially when put in the context of other data that indicates between 2005 and 2015, the percentage of all lowincome seniors jumped by an average of 22 per cent.
A more startling comparison is that in 1995, the seniors’ poverty rate was 3.9 per cent. Now, it’s more than four times that.
It means that many — if not most — of the gains that were made during the 1980s and ’90s to lift seniors out of poverty have been eroded. Couple that with the fact that tax cuts have contributed to a reduction in spending on many public services that affect women more than men. The cost of care for both children and seniors has risen, while funding for all levels of education, including post-secondary, has dropped.
Before the 2016 federal budget, the Broadbent Institute pointed out that old age security and the guaranteed income supplement had fallen to 60 per cent of median income in 2016 from 76 per cent in 1980. It noted that poverty rates will continue to increase as long as OAS and GIS are indexed to inflation, while average earnings rise more quickly.
It also said nearly half of Canadian households with adults aged 55 to 64 have no accrued employer-sponsored pension benefits. Their median retirement assets are barely over $3,000. Even accounting for total net worth, only 28 per cent of Canadian seniors without employer pension plans have saved only enough to last five years.
For the first time in 2017, the federal government put its budget through a gender lens — 60 specific measures — to determine whether or how spending (and presumably cuts) would affect women and men.
But provincial and municipal governments also need to consider the gendered effects of policies as they plan for a future with more seniors and what services are essential to their long-term physical, mental and social wellbeing.
Among the things to be considered are livable wages to allow for increased retirement savings; pension improvements; affordable housing for every age group, and accessible and affordable public transit; more funding for senior-oriented programming in community centres; improvements to both home care and residential care; and even simpler things, like making sure pedestrian crossing lights stay on long enough for seniors to cross.
That’s because, according to projections cited by Statistics Canada, by 2031 there will be 9.6 million seniors. Of those, 5.1 million will be women, accounting for nearly a quarter of the total female population.
By 2061, there could be 7.1 million senior women, including 60,700 centenarians. Women over 65 will comprise nearly a third of Canada’s total female population.
But these are not just statistics. These are our grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters, wives and lovers. And they’ll need all of us to help care for them.