An urban single mother of two preschoolers must earn about $20,052 a year to cover expenses, according to data released Sunday. The report was conducted by Barbara Bergmann, professor of economics at American University in Washington, who arrived at her estimate by using cost of living statistics from various government agencies. It is intended as a public policy tool to identify who needs public aid, and to determine a cost of “basic needs.” (Items such as soap, shampoo and haircuts were not included, Bergmann says.)
Considering the cost of working, some women wonder if their incomes justify what they’ll pay for things such as day care, taxes, transportation and clothing.
Bergmann says women heads of households earned about 74 percent of what male heads of households earned.
The Current Population Survey, conducted annually by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, found that in 1991 women employed full-time, year-round, earned median incomes of $20,553. Men in the same category earned $29,421.
As of March 1992, 58 million American women worked in the civilian labor force. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 8.7 million American women with children under age 6 had incomes, either from jobs or public aid. Of those, 3.2 million females head households, including 1.5 million who work full- or part-time-two-thirds of them for $20,000 or less; 285,000 were looking for work; and 1.5 million were not in the job market, according to the department.
Working mothers can expect to pay $80 to $100 per week per child for full-time day care on a national average, according to Pete Packer, a spokesman for the employee-relocation consulting firm of Runzheimer International of Rochester, Wis. Supply and demand, regional costs of living and the age and number of children also can influence cost, he says, though infant care is more labor-intensive, so it’s more expensive than preschool daycare.
In some cities, for example, day care outside the home-usually cheaper than in-home care-can cost up to $500 per month for one child, Packer says.
“Society is posing an impossible choice to many single parents with children,” says Anne Ladky, executive director of Women Employed, a national nonprofit organization in Chicago that works to enhance women’s economic status. For example, for most women on public aid, says Ladky, one choice is to take a low-wage job, thereby losing goverment-paid health benefits. The other choice, she says, is to stay on public assistance and forgo on-the-job experience.
“Many of these women want to work, but it’s not clear how work is going to improve their lives,” Ladky says.
In 1992, nearly five million families-largely mothers with children-received public aid, according to the American Public Welfare Association, a national nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C. The median national monthly payment to a single mother of two was $647 in cash and food stamps, for an annual income of $7,764, says Kathy Patterson, association spokeswoman.
Manuelita Becerra, 30, a single mother of two children ages 6 and 5 living on Chicago’s North Side, is a case in point. She had an annual income of just below $12,000. She is completing her high school degree, and can work only limited hours at the job she began Feb. 1 bagging groceries for $4.45 an hour, giving her about $320 per month. She says she expects to lose part of the $282 per month in food stamps she had been receiving and all of the $367 per month in public aid because of the job. With those types of aid, her monthly income was $969.
After average monthly expenses-rent, $450; utilities, $250; groceries in addition to food stamps, $100; a subsidized day care center, $96; and transportation, $48-she is left with about $45. Clothing and emergencies eat into that quickly. The grocery store where she works, for example, requires employees to wear white shirts. “So I bought five white shirts at the secondhand store for $1.50 each,” she says, costing 17 percent of her January spending money.
“Sometimes I think I should stay on public aid,” Becerra says. “If anything, I’m losing more (by working). Maybe I’m wasting my time.”
She notes that public aid pays more than her job.
“If they’d give me more hours at work, I think I would leave school and stick with the job,” she says. “But I don’t have anybody to watch the kids in th evening.” She hopes to improve her situation over time. In the future, her General Equivalency Diploma should help her earn more, and day care should cost less as the children get older, she says. Becerra also is seeking child support from her children’s father. But some days, her efforts seem futile, she says. “Sometimes I think the only way my life will get straight is if I marry a man with money.”
Marschan McGraw, 20, a Near North Side resident, is in a similar position. She is a single, unemployed mother of one, and receives $458 per month in public aid and food stamps. Her basic monthly living expenses total $448, relatively low because her public housing rent is $29 a month. It is a frugal lifestyle: She has no phone, and she cuts her own hair.
In addition to her 3-year-old daughter, McGraw also cooks, cleans and runs errands for her mother, who is ill. In December she finished her GED and is taking classes part-time toward an associate’s degree in radiography, which she hopes to attain in two or three years. After that, she wants to earn a bachelor’s degree in science.
She wants to get off public aid and out of Chicago public housing. “I just want to be independent,” she says. For her, the work is worth it. “This is just a stepping stone for me until I’m able to be on my own.”
Even women without the financial pressures that McGraw and Becerra face wrestle with costs and compromises that come with most jobs, such as sex discrimination.
On average, men earn three times the amount of experience-based annual increases compared to women, according to a report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a national nonprofit organization in Washington. Men earn an additional 24 cents for every year of work experience; white women earn 7 cents more each year, and minority women earn only 6 cents more, the institute found.
Roberta Spalter-Roth, who conducted the study, says, “Women don’t take low-wage jobs because they’re balancing work and family responsibilities.” The important factors that determine a woman’s wages are the same as for men: job skills, education, and the conditions of work, she says.
For Mary Reamer, 48, a married psychotherapist now in private practice in Fairfax, Va., working is decidedly worth it financially.
“These are the good years,” says Reamer. “But it’s not always been like this. It took me 10 years to get where I could leave an (employer) and work out of my home. I’ve just attained it in the last six months.”
Reamer still works the same number of hours she worked at a mental health clinic, 25 per week. Last year, the clinic paid her $3,500 per month for those hours.
So that she could work, Reamer paid an in-home baby-sitter $400 a month, spent an average of $400 per month on work clothing and dry cleaning and $80 per month on transportation, meaning the cost of working took 25 percent of her earnings.
This year, Reamer works evenings in a office above her garage. Her office is claimed as an income tax deduction, which helps defray her $3,700 monthly mortgage payment.
She charges most clients $70 or $80 per hour, but some pay a fraction of that, so she earns about $4,000 per month. Since Reamer works evenings, her husband and 13-year-old son care for her 8-year-old son. Occasional business travel costs about $20 per month, she says.
Marschand McGraw wouldn’t mind earning that much money someday. For now, though, $15,000 or $20,000 “would be just great,” she says. It would take that to get her off public aid and into a better home, she says.
But she’d still cut her own hair.
