It’s not just the wage gap, or low-paying jobs, that keep womenfrom saving enough to retire comfortably. Housework hurts too.

According to a report from the Retirement Equity Lab at TheNew School, most of older women’s work is unpaid.

While both men and women aged 55–64 spend the same amount oftime working each week—47.9 hours a week for men and 48 hours aweek for women—including both paid work in the labor market andunpaid household work, the amount of work that men get paid forsubstantially exceeds the amount of paying work that women do.

In fact, out of their 47.9 hours, men spend 30.1 hours in paidwork, while women only get paid for 21.8 hours of their 48.

Women actually spend more of their time on unpaid work—26.2hours per week—than they do on paid work.

Those 26+ hours of unpaid work that women do are devoted tounpaid household work, such as food preparation, cleaning,caregiving, etc.

Men don’t customarily engage in such work to the extent thatwomen do.

But the disparity doesn’t stop there; not only do older womenget paid for a smaller share of their working time, the reportpoints out, but in the labor market they are more likely than mento be in low-paid jobs.

In fact, 38 percent of older women make less than $15 an hour,while just 28 percent of men do.

While older men and women have about the same low rates of access to a retirement plan at work(45 percent for men and 47 percent for women), women’s ability tosave for retirement takes another hit thanks to thecombination of low hourly pay and the fact that such a largequantity of unpaid work could hamper their ability to take on morepaid work.

Older women have a median balance of $70,000 in their retirementaccounts, compared to $106,000 for men.

The report recommends that, to make sure that all workers have asecure retirement, Congress needs not only to raise the minimumwage, but also to enact Guaranteed Retirement Accounts (GRAs).

GRAs provide retirement savings accounts to all workers as asupplement to an expanded Social Security program.

The GRA’s $600 refundable tax credit and employer contribution,it adds, “ensure that even low-paid workers, a majority of whom arewomen, can afford to save for retirement.”