Poverty In America

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Poverty in America is a crucial issue, with remedies constantly debated by the government and the public at large. However, problems and barriers affecting employment, financial precarity, and poverty differ based on gender due to factors such as immigration status, marital/child status, and “traditional” stereotypes surrounding women and labor. Census data from 2018 shows that 12.9% of women in America live in poverty in comparison to 10.6% of men in America (Bleweis, Boesch & Gaines). Structurally, “traditional” American lives include a nuclear family, with a working father, stay at home mother, and multiple children. As a consequence of these stereotypes, the stigma around women entering the labor force resulted in sexist policies creating …show more content…
“Women who are child care workers earned a median weekly wage of $492, and women who are maids and housekeepers earned $457 per week,” this sparse number is startling because it shows the lack of value on child and home labor, labor that normally goes unpaid (Bleweis, Boesch & Gaines). In connection to the subjection of women to low wage jobs, immigration status is a key factor in women’s poverty. Low wage jobs include food service, cleaning jobs, and estheticians. Immigrant women (both legal and illegal) are constantly subjected to these jobs sectors and in turn exploited by their employers. Examples of these acts of exploitation include not being paid a wage and subsisting solely on tips, long hours doing physical labor with little pay, and public humiliation (Nir, 1). This exploitation emerges from the selfish interests of American and non-American employers as women, especially immigrant women, are easier to exploit; “the owners of Iris Nails, a chain with shops in Manhattan and Brooklyn, had seven stores that generated sales of $8 million per year...At the two Iris salons on Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side, longtime workers described starting out at wages of $30 and $40 a day” (Nir, 5). Although exploitation in the workplace is also a problem faced by men, it becomes even more of an …show more content…
The complex connections between all of these factors stem from the “traditional” views for what women’s labor should be (if women should be in the labor force at all) and the constant disregard of the unpaid labor of housewives and mothers; “on both sides of polarization, the jobs lasting and being created are “women's work”, evoking the same qualities women practice every day by doing a disproportionate amount of unpaid emotional and domestic labor” (Harris, 78-79). The structural and capitalistic factors (sexism in the workforce and employee exploitation) that affect women’s poverty in America can only be remedied through changes in policy to protect women in the workforce, and make the types of jobs available, along with wages, fair and equal regardless of
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