(Daphne Bramham/ Vancouver Sun) — Women face economic disadvantages throughout their lifetimes, but it is near the end of their lives that it is most acute.
Nowhere is that more evident than in Metro Vancouver, which has Canada’s highest percentage of people living in low-income households. The 2016 census data for the region indicates that the percentage of women living in low-income households is 7.5-per-cent higher than men. But past the age of 65? The percentage of poor women jumps to 15.8 per cent.
“This is structural patriarchy,” says Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, who put the census poverty numbers through a gender lens. “The entire experience of doing this has taught me we have to view things through a gender lens. If you want to do something in terms of policy, you have to understand the cleavages in society, and age and gender are two of them.”
The reasons for the gendered poverty gap range from the facts that women live longer, earn an average of 25 per cent less throughout their lives than men, often take time away from the workplace to have children and are able to contribute less to pension plans and retirement funds. Among the oldest of today’s seniors, married women were much less likely to have done paid work outside the home, while the high mortality rates during the Second World War meant many women never married.
Across Metro, 16.5 per cent of seniors live below the low-income threshold of $22,133 in after-tax income for a single or $31,201 for a couple. The largest concentration of poor seniors is in Vancouver, which alone has 19,115 of them. (…)