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123 Monthly Lab. Rev. 26 (2000)
Women Paid Low Wages: Who They Are and Where They Work

handle is hein.journals/month123 and id is 858 raw text is: - - * : s : : * s! ii i i!: V - V !: : Women paid low wages: who they are and where they work Women are more likely to be low paid if they are young, single, or less educated or if they are employed in service occupations, retail trade, agriculture, or personal services c:, Wco wages. Even among women who were of prime working age (those between the ages of 25 and 45), 31 percent worked in jobs that paid low wages. (See table 1 .) Of course, low wages may not necessarily rel- egate these women to a life of deprivation: women who receive low wages may live in families with other earners, so that their total family income may lift them above the poverty level. Or these women may live in small families (recall that low wages are defined as wage rates that are inadequate to sup- port a family of four above the poverty level), so that their wages can adequately support them- selves and their lesser number of family members. Thus, in order to better understand the conse- quences of being paid low wages, it is important to examine the extent to which low wages result in women living in or near poverty. In this regard, then, for each woman who received low wages, the article compares her total family income dur- ing the previous year (1997) with the Government's official 1997 poverty level' and with 150 percent of that poverty level. This ap- proach allows the proportion of low-paid women who are officially poor and the proportion who live in near poverty to be estimated. The results indicate that among all adult women who were paid low wages, 17 percent lived in poverty and 31 percent lived below 150 percent of the poverty level. The following tabu- lation shows the poverty status and receipt of income transfers for low-wage working women in 1997: Marlene Kim Marlene Kim is a professor in the Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts. esearch indicates that, over the past two decades, an increasing proportion of work- LI (ers held jobs that pay low wages. Most of this research focuses on men, because the risk of falling into these jobs has increased for male work- ers. Yet it is important not to ignore the low-wage female workforce: women hold the majority (59 per- cent) of low-wage jobs,' and they are still more likely to be low paid than are male workers. But what is the extent of low-paying work among women, who are these poorly paid women, and what types of jobs do they hold? In answering these questions, this article uses data from the March 1998 Current Population Survey.' As many in the field have done, low-wage workers are defined as those workers who could not support a family of four above the Government's official poverty level while working 52 weeks per year, 40 hours per week, or a total of 2,080 hours per year. For workers paid on an hourly basis, this means that low-wage work- ers are defined as those who were paid no more than $7.91 per hou($16,45f0/2,80hours) in 1998-1 for work- ers paid weekly, hourly wage rates were estimated by dividing the worker's usual weekly wages by usual hours worked per week. The sample includes all adult women aged 18 to 64 who were wage and salary workers; the self-employed were excluded. Extent of women's low-wage work In 1998,approximately 16millionwomen, or39percent of female wage and salary workers, were paid low 26 Monthly Labor Review September 2000

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