Being a woman in Marin is hard

You might not think that in Marin, where the median house price is $1.7 million, typically selling for tens of thousands over asking price and often for cash, and where the median income is nearly $122,000 (in 2020 dollars), the increased costs of everything from gas to food nowadays wouldn't be a problem for the county's residents.

But there are a lot of people who are just getting by in Marin.

“Prices are going up, but wages are not going up,” says Gloria Huazano, who works as a nanny — an essential job — and rents a room, not an apartment of her own, in Novato.

It doesn't surprise me that the people feeling the squeeze the most are women. Women overwhelmingly work low-paying jobs — as child care workers, like Huazano, and elder care workers, restaurant servers, maids, teachers, cashiers, retail workers and receptionists. But even women with higher-paying careers can struggle.

I never liked to talk about money, especially since I make so much less than all my friends and I've been embarrassed. But now, when there are 2 million fewer women in the workforce, all of us need to.

Women often dial back paying work to be at home to raise children — it happened before the pandemic but it's gotten worse the past two years — and then struggle to get back into the workplace; others quit altogether, sometimes willingly and other times out of necessity because of the exponential costs of child care. Some have to leave their jobs to caregive a spouse, sibling or parent, or in an increasing number of cases, to raise their grandchildren. Some find themselves divorced at midlife, as I did, or widowed — the average age of widowhood in the United States is 59. Some may be happily single and then a financial crisis happens — an illness, a recession, a pandemic, furloughs or layoffs. Some may have lost their job and are unable to find a new one because of ageism. But millions have worked hard all their lives and are still struggling because all women, but especially Black women and other women of color, Native American women, disabled women, and often queer and trans women, make less than White heterosexual men.

Is it any wonder that older women overwhelmingly live in poverty?

As surprising as it may be, that was my trajectory, too, despite having a college degree and a 40-year award-winning career in journalism, and two books under my belt. Years of being underpaid — women make 82 cents for every dollar a man earns, and that has certainly been my life story, yes, even at the IJ — have cost me tens of thousands of dollars that could have paid bills, made life less stressful, not require me to have several side hustles or, ideally, been invested. Being underpaid also impacts what a woman can collect in Social Security, so it has lifelong ramifications.

There are two things that saved me: I bought the family house from my former husband at an affordable price never thinking

I'd be able to hold onto it but have against all odds — it has a under-market rental unit so low-income people like me can afford to live in Marin — and my parents died and left me a small inheritance. Believe me, I'd rather have my parents alive.

Until my small inheritance — not nearly enough to retire on but more than I ever would have been able to have — there was no money for repairs, even small ones, and a house

built in 1945 needs a lot of repairs.

When we talk about the importance of generational wealth — long denied BIPOC people because of racist policies here and across the country, this is why. It matters.

I never liked to talk about money, especially since I make so much less than all my friends and

I've been embarrassed. But now, when there are 2 million fewer women in the workforce, all of us need to.

As Rebecca Walker writes in the introduction of her just-released anthology, “Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo,” “Until women begin to talk freely about money, to amass information about money, to reflect critically on how money works in our society and strategize how to change it, until we put as much thought into negotiating our money as we do into maintaining our relationships, plotting our careers, or raising our children, we are at an even greater risk of remaining victims of a predatory financial system. Our contributions will continue to be unrecognized and undervalued, and our compensation will continue to pale in comparison to our male counterparts'. We will remain ignorant where we should be informed, silent where we could be loud, and weak where we must be strong.”

To be clear, anyone who owns a house in Marin or the San Francisco Bay Area cannot call themselves

poor, and I don't. If I sold my house, I know I'd make double or more than what I paid for it, but that money wouldn't last long renting around here. So

I'd have to move out of the Bay Area after decades of building a community here, and I want my community as I age. In the meantime, in a county where a single person can make up to $102,450 a year and be considered low income and $63,950 a year to be considered very low income, I am low income — very low income if I had to live on my salary alone — and so you bet inflation is killing me.

Just last week, the IJ editorial board lamented that the average salary of local public school teachers — $89,935, an amount I and my fellow IJ reporters would love to make — isn't keeping up with the cost of local housing, let alone inflation, and “should be a community concern.”

It should be. That a woman providing essential services like Gloria Huazano most likely makes nowhere near $89,935 and lives in a room — not a place of her own, but a rented room — also should be a community concern. That women overwhelmingly live in poverty as they age isn't just a community concern — it should be a priority.