Feminization of Poverty

The podcast discusses the feminization of poverty, focusing on the struggles faced by women, especially single mothers, in poverty. Women are more likely to be in low-paying jobs, leading to unemployment and instability. Statistics show a significant difference in poverty rates between families headed by single women versus men. A personal story shared by a high schooler named Peyton highlights the harsh realities of growing up in poverty, including lack of privacy, poor diet, reliance on hand-me-downs, and limited birthday gifts. Despite the challenges, Peyton's life improved after being adopted. Hi, my name is Kaitlyn Carolino, and on today's podcast, we're going to be talking about the feminization of poverty. I want to preface this podcast in saying you'll be listening to a recording of a high schooler who talks about her experience in poverty in her young adolescence. She'll be talking about how it affected her and the environment around her at the time and also just her experience as a whole. So let's get into it. So what is the feminization of poverty? It is an increase in the percentage of women who are in poverty or who are poor. When it comes down to poverty, the large percentage of people who are impoverished are young adolescents or women. What factors can explain this trend? It's because more women are raising children by themselves than a man of the household. They're usually single mothers or head of the household, and because of this, they have a tough time earning money. They spend more time at home trying to take care of the children, or if they aren't at home, they're at work, and that leaves the oldest child to take care of the youngest if there is another child, or if there's one, then the mother is most likely going to not have a job or have an unstable career and take care of her child. The reason that men are not in this large percentage of impoverished people is because men's work is defined as higher paying jobs like doctors, pilots, and engineers, and even though there are more women in the engineering field today, it is a very slowly growing percentage. The lower paying jobs are usually nurses and flight attendants, and those are usually managed by women. Why are women led to unemployment? Because of the lower wages from being a nurse or being a flight attendant or any other job that usually is lower paying that women are attending to, women suffer a high rate of unemployment because of the caregiving role and maternity leave or any other problems they might be having in their life. Because of the patterns of instability, it might lead to women having a disorderly work history, which can cause them to switch jobs or, again, having the lower paying jobs or even not having a job in general, their career status might be stable. And finally, I'm going to end off with talking about statistics. 52% of poor families headed by a single woman with children are poor, compared to the 10% of all poor families headed by men with children is only 10%. That is a 40% difference. And most of the time, it's because going back to the higher paying jobs, men will have a higher paying job that requires heavy lifting and other things. Another percentage that stands out is that 27% of poverty among families with young children headed by women, there is no man present. So if there's no man present, poverty rates go up for women because there's not two incomes at the same time, there's only one income. And again, it goes back to the caregiving role. And it also comes back to being a mother, whether you're at work or you're at home. With that, I'm going to lead us into our recording of this girl named Peyton. She's a high schooler at the time and she's going to talk about her experience. When I was very young, I grew up in a trailer park. Even though now I realize how tough it really was. We had a small like it was like a red little house. The neighborhood was very, very sketchy. Usually I slept in the den with my Nana and my brother. I slept on a mattress on the floor. My Nana slept on a couch and my brother had a race car bed. There were bedrooms, but they weren't for us. It was for other people. There was no doors inside the house at all, except for the front and the back ones. We had no privacy. The bathrooms were covered with like, not really, they were like blankets. At night, we just kind of lay there listening to whatever I was watching on the TV. It was usually probably like a night show. There was always people yelling in the neighborhood at all hours. You could always hear sirens coming to one of the houses. We would have people just randomly come knock on our door asking for food or coffee. We didn't really have full meals, just kind of whatever we could afford. Mostly junk food. Dinner would be like microwave noodles, sometimes just chips, or maybe even pizza if we're lucky. Mostly McDonald's. We liked McDonald's a lot. And I didn't realize how bad our diet was until I got older. The windows were covered with old blankets because actual curtains were just too expensive. And we had to keep them up all year round, just as many as they want. We didn't really have, like, we didn't really have, like, an AC, true AC unit, like, for cold. We didn't have, like, hot air. We'd have to put heaters all throughout the house. Most of my clothes and stuff I would wear were hand-me-downs from my cousins. And if they didn't fit, then I would go to Goodwill or Walmart. It was, Walmart was mainly if we needed, like, good clothes, but Goodwill was just kind of, like, whatever we could afford. On birthdays, I knew not to really expect much, but I was really young so I didn't always ask for much. I would get, like, mainly stuff in, like, Dollar Tree, like little Barbie dolls or stuff like that, just nothing too big. One of the big, like, good things that came was in the summer, once a week, we had, like, this car that would come through, and it would, like, honk its horn, and every kid in the neighborhood would run outside, like it was Christmas. And they had, like, food in the trunk of the car, and it was, like, school food. Like, they got it from the school, like, sandwiches or, like, fruit, and you'd get, like, juices, and just kind of, literally school food. I had no clue who the people were or how they knew where we lived. There was always just something new going on in that house a lot. A lot of my family members that didn't have a lot of money either would often come and try and stay with us, because even though we lived in a trailer park, it was kind of the most that anyone had in our family at the time. It was a lot just of trying to, like, hide how everything, like, how I felt about everything, because once I was really little, it didn't matter, but once I started to grow up and see what the other kids had, it was kind of, like, I just was questioning how that could afford so much, when, again, most of our stuff kind of came from Walmart, Goodwill, or Dollar Tree. But it's okay, because I grew up, I got adopted, and everything turned around. And with that, I want to thank you for listening in on my podcast.