Women are more likely than men to live in poverty; families headed by single women are likewise also disproportionately likely to fall below the poverty line. And if you're looking for a way to attack that, raising the minimum wage is a good starting point. That's because
women are more than 64 percent of people making the minimum wage or less, and the federal minimum wage is a poverty wage.
Full-time work at $7.25 an hour, the federal minimum wage, pays $15,080 a year. That's nearly $4,500 below the poverty level for a family of three. It's even slightly below the poverty level for a family of two. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, as congressional Democrats have proposed and President Barack Obama has endorsed, would make a big difference:
If that mother were earning $10.10 per hour instead, she could bring home roughly $21,000 per year—an increase in annual earnings of more than $5,900. These additional earnings would not only be critical to many families’ financial well-being, but would also provide a significant boost to the economy as whole by stimulating much-needed spending on goods and services.
If the minimum wage were increased to $10.10 an hour, the vast majority of women impacted would be 20 years old or older. Contrary to popular belief, the majority of minimum-wage workers are not teenagers looking to earn extra pocket money but adults working to support themselves and their families. Nearly 80 percent of women who earned at or below the minimum wage in 2012 were 20 years old or older, and just less than 40 percent were 30 years old or older.
Now is the time to give America a raise. Sign our petition urging Congress to pass the Harkin-Miller bill and finally raise the minimum wage.