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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the disparity doesn’t stop there; not only do older women get paid for a smaller share of their working time, the report points out, but in the labor market they are more likely than men to 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 to save for retirement takes another hit thanks to the combination of low hourly pay and the fact that such a large quantity of unpaid work could hamper their ability to take on more paid work.

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

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

GRAs provide retirement savings accounts to all workers as a supplement 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 are women, can afford to save for retirement.”

Instant Insights /

Housework adds 26+ unpaid hours a week to older women's work

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