2011-03-02 08:43:10
The White House dropped a statistics-stuffed report compiling reams of federal data about the state of American women today.
None of the information is exactly new, but a number of the graphs featured in the report caught The Lookout's eye--they offer a compelling illustration of the status of women today. For instance, more young women are going to college than their male counterparts for the first time in U.S. history. But, women are much more likely to go into lower-paying fields than men when they graduate--thereby perpetuating the long-standing wage gap between the genders.
And women--especially minority women--are still more likely to live in poverty than men. Check out five of the graphs from the report below.
Women are waiting longer on average to have their first child:
As they delay childbirth, more women are going to college and graduate school. In fact, women just recently passed men in the race to a bachelor's degree, and that gap appears to be widening.
But that increased education hasn't yet resulted in women earning as much as men in the workplace:
Maybe that's in part because women spend more time than men working outside of the labor force. That gap holds even when you compare married working women to married working men. Men spend a greater percentage of their time on leisure activities, while women work on household tasks and caring for other family members:
Women do continue to live longer than men and suffer less frequently from heart disease--yet many chronic diseases afflict women at a higher rate than men. Women are more likely to suffer from depression, mobility problems and arthritis, for example. The chart below shows that women are also more likely to be obese:
Senior Obama White House adviser Valerie Jarrett said on a conference call with reporters that the president will use the data as a "tool" to inform policy initiatives, though she would not name any specific new moves the administration is contemplating in the realm of gender.
"You really have to look at the whole story of a woman's life," Jarrett said. "This report gives us a comprehensive framework to do that."