The Two-Income Trap (16 page)

Gayle was worried about making it on her own with three children, but she figured that she was pretty well situated to make a go of it. Brad let her keep the house, and he didn’t intend to fight her in court over anything else they owned. He was hoping to keep the legal bills to a minimum. Gayle says with an embarrassed laugh, “We got one of those TV Guide divorces, the ‘We agree on everything’ kind.”

Besides, Gayle was a good provider in her own right. She had a degree in communications and nine years in the Human Resources department at Exxon. By the time Brad moved out, she had been promoted to manager, and, thanks to “an awesome raise,” she was earning $46,000 a year. In short, Gayle had about as much going for her as any modern middle-class mother starting her newly single life could hope for. She figured that she and her kids could make it.

Up to now, we have scrutinized, analyzed, poked, prodded, and otherwise expounded on nearly every aspect of the financial life of the modern middle-class family, but we haven’t addressed
all
middle-class families. Indeed, we have been silent about the families who are most often in the news for their financial woes, those who first come to mind when the phrase “parents in financial trouble” comes up. We refer, of course, to the single mother.

Conventional wisdom holds that the single mother has a tough time making ends meet. (There are some single fathers, of course, but the overwhelming majority of custodial single parents are women, so we begin this discussion with them; we will return to the fathers later in this chapter.) Generations before America had even
dreamed of a government-sponsored welfare program, charitable foundations offered their assistance to “Widows and Orphans,” based on the widespread understanding that a woman with children would have a tough time getting by on her own. During the divorce explosion of the 1970s, the spotlight turned from the widow to the divorced mother, but the concept was basically the same: Without a man around, a woman with children was in big trouble. In the 1980s, sociologist Lenore Weitzman made headlines with her claim that in the immediate wake of divorce, a woman’s standard of living drops by 73 percent from her married state.
¹
Several scholars later showed that Weitzman overstated the extent of the decline, but there is widespread agreement about her basic conclusion: Most mothers tumble down the economic ladder after they divorce.
²
Nor is the postdivorce financial tumble a phenomenon confined solely to poor women. In fact, the drop is hardest for women in the middle and upper classes, since they have farther to fall.
³

A generation ago, flush with the emerging power of the feminist movement, women’s groups began to push what seemed like an obvious solution to the economic woes facing divorced mothers: Help women get more money. According to this logic, single mothers would be safe only if they earned more money in the workplace and if the laws were changed to squeeze more out of their ex-husbands. The first item on the agenda fit neatly with advancing the cause for all women, regardless of marital status. Women should get more job training, better educations, and stronger legal protection in the workplace, which should all translate into one thing—bigger paychecks for
all
women, single and married alike. The second objective focused directly on the rules of divorce. Women’s paychecks should be supplemented by generous child support awards from their ex-husbands, which should be rigorously enforced by every sheriff’s department in the country. The double prescription—make more and collect more—promised to lift the single mother from a precarious state of dependence and bring her the financial security she so desperately needed.

Was the women’s movement right? This is one of those rare social theories that we don’t have to debate in the abstract. The past generation has been a giant laboratory for testing exactly the get-a-job-get-child-support-and-be-safe prescription; all we have to do is look at the evidence.

Over the past generation, millions of married women have embraced the protect-yourself strategy. Going to college, getting a good job, and staying in the workforce have come to be seen as the only sensible way for a married mother to protect herself in this age of rampant divorce. Conservative social critic Danielle Crittenden observes:

This attitude reflects our collective common sense. If a woman stays in the workforce, she will gain experience and make more money. And, if she makes more money, she will be better off if her husband leaves her—or so the argument goes.

Once again, we focus on the circumstances of the middle-class family. There has been a great deal of news (much of it bad) about the plight of the low-income single mother. Trapped in poverty without a husband, with a limited education and dismal career prospects, garnering little support from the state, the community, or from the child’s father, chronically poor mothers have become the living symbols of the rough underside of the economy. But what about middle-class single mothers, women like Gayle Pritchard who have a good education, substantial work experience, a decent income, and, in
most cases, an ex-husband solidly on the hook for child support? These women have followed the go-to-work prescription faithfully, making astounding gains in nearly every arena over the past generation—gains that should have translated into rising fortunes for the postdivorce family.

What happened when millions of middle-class mothers headed into the workplace? The media tends to focus on the bad news—the shocking sexual harassment of a female employee at Mitsubishi or antiquated policies that keep women out of prestigious military colleges and off fancy golf courses. The bad news makes for good headlines, but it shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow one very important fact: American women have come a very long way in a very short time.

Consider, for example, women’s enhanced legal protection. The mantra of equal opportunity in the workplace has become so ingrained in our collective consciousness that it can be easy to forget the (not so distant) days when the playing field wasn’t nearly so level. When I (Elizabeth) was an elementary school teacher fresh out of college in 1970, the public school district didn’t even bother to hide the fact that there were two separate pay scales—one for men and one for women. The differential was a matter of public record, and it produced little concern among either the public or my fellow teachers. Indeed, the policy was widely viewed as a normal feature of almost every “family-friendly” workplace. After all, men needed those higher wages to support a family at home. Today public schools, along with virtually every other employer in the country, have dismantled their separate pay structures, thanks largely to sweeping reforms in federal and state laws. Moreover, nearly every major employer in the United States has adopted a formal policy of equal opportunity for women. The battle for full legal equality may not be entirely won, but during the past generation women have made phenomenal strides—progress that has translated into material gains on the job.

Bolstered with protection from the courts, today’s women are better prepared for the workforce than any other generation in history. Not only are they better educated than any previous cohort of
women, but by some measures they are now even better educated than men. Today’s young women are more likely to finish high school than young men—reversing the situation of a generation ago. They are also more likely to pursue higher education. In 1970, six out of ten college students were men; today that figure is exactly inverted—nearly six out of ten college students are women.
⁵
Armed with better educations, women have seen their professional opportunities mushroom. In the early years of my [Elizabeth’s] career, it seemed that at nearly every step along the way, my compatriots and I were the “first” women to achieve something or other. In 1975, at a prestigious law firm on Wall Street, my friend Valerie and I were the first women ever offered summer internships. (Over the course of that summer I was mistaken for a waitress, a secretary, a cleaning person, and “Harry’s daughter,” despite the obligatory suit and floppy bow tie I donned every day.) Today, women account for nearly one-third of practicing attorneys nationwide, and women are almost as likely as men to be managers or supervisors. Women also account for 41 percent of university professors, and they now hold at least one seat on the board of directors of nearly three out of four major corporations in America.
⁶

All that progress has translated into just what the feminists and politicians had hoped for—more money for women. Since 1960, women’s wages have grown
ten times
faster than men’s.
⁷
Women with children were not left behind. Today, employed women with children earn just 4 percent less than their childless sisters.
⁸
Women also face a much lower risk of unemployment than they did a generation ago, they are more likely to own their own businesses, and a growing number earn more than their husbands.
⁹
Women haven’t yet caught up with men, but they are gaining fast.

So women are making more money. But what about the other half of the prescription—child support? The “deadbeat dad” makes a prominent appearance in nearly every conversation about single mothers. There is some truth to those headlines, but there is another truth that gets lost in all the hoopla over the shiftless father: Women
have made enormous strides in collecting from their ex-husbands. A generation ago there was little government support for a woman whose ex was delinquent on his child support payments. In the late 1970s, as a young lawyer, I [Elizabeth] tried to help my friend Marcie garnish her ex-husband’s wages to enforce a child support order. The fellow was an international importer from a wealthy family. He had a high-paying job, but he hadn’t paid a cent of his court-ordered support since he had walked out two years earlier—a classic deadbeat if ever there was one. Meanwhile, Marcie and her toddler were supplementing her income as a teacher’s aide with food stamps. Despite my legal training and young-lawyer zeal, I could not find a single person in the any of the county or state offices to help Marcie. When I finally initiated a lawsuit on her behalf (something she could never have afforded on her own), the local district attorney told me that enforcing child support orders “just isn’t in my job description.”

It wasn’t until the 1980s that this system changed. Congress passed a series of laws that guaranteed women all around the country the opportunity to garnish their ex-husband’s paychecks.
¹⁰
Congress also ordered uniform support guidelines in 1984; until then, each woman was at the mercy of whatever whims and prejudices influenced the judge who decided her particular case.
¹¹
The penalties for nonpayment have also been stiffened. In some states a man who falls behind on his child support payments stands to lose his driver’s license or his work permit (such as a contractor’s license). He may even be thrown in jail. Today, federal and state governments spend more than $3 billion on child support enforcement, compared with less than $400 million (inflation adjusted) in the mid-1970s.
¹²
The system is still far from perfect, but these improvements have helped millions of women. Since 1976, the proportion of women receiving child support has increased 17 percent for divorced mothers and
300 percent
for never-married mothers.
¹³

The numbers show that the feminist prescription has been followed to the letter. Today’s middle-class mothers embark on single life with better educations, better job training, better legal support,
and bigger paychecks than any women in history. They are backed up by more effective state-sponsored child support enforcement than ever before. In a single generation, their gains have been nothing short of extraordinary. With all that progress, we should confidently predict that while single mothers may still have a tougher time than married parents, their situation must be improving. Right?

Wrong. Despite all the progress, middle-class single mothers are no more financially secure today than they were a generation ago. Indeed, our data show that despite their amazing advancements at work, in school, and in the courts, these women are actually
less
secure than they were just twenty-five years ago.

In chapter 1, we described our astonishment when we first saw the bankruptcy data for single mothers. That first look told us that something is amiss. Badly so. Single mothers are now more likely than any other group to file for bankruptcy—more likely than the elderly, more likely than divorced men, more likely than minorities, and more likely than people living in poor neighborhoods. Indeed, single mothers are 50 percent more likely than married parents to go bankrupt, and three times more likely than childless people—married or single.
¹⁴

Motherhood is now the single best indicator that an unmarried middle-class woman will end up bankrupt. In the world of financial devastation, there are two groups of people: single mothers and others.

And the lines at the bankruptcy courts are not the only sign of distress. Federal Reserve data revealed that
one in eleven
single parents are more than 60 days past due on their bills (compared with one in thirty married couples without children).
¹⁵
Single mothers are also more likely to lose their homes. When we analyzed unpublished data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, we found that among single parents who had purchased a home in the 1980s with a mortgage backed by the Federal Housing Administration
(FHA), more than
one in ten
had lost their home by 2002 because of foreclosure.
¹⁶