By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 10 years ago

Chart of the Day: Mothers are the sole or primary breadwinner in 40 percent of US households

chart of women breadwinners

According to a new Pew Research Center report, a record 40 percent of households now have a mother who is the sole or primary source of income for their families.

This figure includes two very different groups of women: 63 percent are single mothers and 37 percent are women who are married and have a higher income than their spouses. As Bryce Covert notes at Think Progress, the former group  is sitting pretty–at nearly $80,000 in 2011, their family income tends to be much higher than the national median. The single mothers, on the other hand, are earning just $23,000.

And, as a recent Legal Momentum report shows, the US is the worst place–no really, the actual worst of all high-income countries–to be a single parent.

 

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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