The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [121]
20 Calculated from data available on number of bankruptcy filings in 2002 from the Administrative Office of the United States Courts; U.S. Census Bureau, Table F- 10, Presence of Children Under 18 Years Old by Type of Family and Median and Mean Income, 1974 to 2000. Available at http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/f10.html [3/27/03].
21 Our projection is based on a linear regression of women filing for personal bankruptcy alone in the United States in 1981, 1991, and 2001. The R-squared value was 0.988. The calculation assumes that single mothers as a proportion of all single women filing for bankruptcy remained constant throughout this period. As we noted in the text, this assumption likely overstates the number of single women with children in the early 1980s and thus understates the growth in filings among this group from 1981 through 2001. The calculation also assumes that in 1981 and 1991 all single-filing women were not married and all joint-filing women were married. For 2001, actual marital status is used. Data for 1981 are from Warren, Westbrook, and Sullivan, As We Forgive Our Debtors. Data for 1991 are from Teresa A. Sullivan, Elizabeth Warren, and Jay Lawrence Westbrook, The Fragile Middle Class: Americans in Debt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
22 Calculated from U.S. Census Bureau, Table F2, Family Households, by Type, Age of Own Children, Educational Attainment, and Race and Hispanic Origin of Householder, March 2000 (June 21, 2001). Available at http://landview.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/p20-537/2000/tabF2.pdf [12/3/02].
23 Fifty-six percent of single mothers in bankruptcy had occupational prestige scores in the middle 40 percent for women in the general population.
24 Bankruptcy data include current homeowners and women who lost their home in the past five years because of financial reasons. The home ownership rate among all single parents is from U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey, 1999 (prepublished data), Table 1500, Composition of Consumer Unit: Average Annual Expenditures and Characteristics (data are for single person with children).
25 According to the papers she filed with the court, her workout with her mortgage lender required her to pay monthly mortgage costs (including back payments) of $1,435. In addition, she paid utility costs of $600 and property taxes of $2,700, for a total of $2,260 a month. Her take-home pay before her most recent raise was about $3,000 per month. Gayle later got a substantial raise, so the proportion of her paycheck dedicated to housing dropped to two-thirds of her total take-home pay.
26 “Full-time employment within marriage does not necessarily protect women from a declining standard of living after marital disruption. Full-time working women who contributed a relatively small amount to family income (either because of their own low wages or their husband’s high wages) experienced much larger declines in living standards than other women. Whereas women who did not work or worked only part-time before separation could enter the workforce or increase the number of hours they worked, full-time working women would have a harder time increasing their incomes without further training.” Bianchi, Subaiya, and Kahn, “The Gender Gap in the Economic Well-Being of Nonresident Fathers and Custodial Mothers,” pp. 192-200.
27 During the 1980s and 1990s, child support payment levels among men who paid in full averaged 18 percent of their income. Patricia A. McManus and Thomas A. Diprete, “Losers and Winners: The Financial Consequences of Separation and Divorce for Men,” American Sociological Review 66 (April 2001), footnote on p. 260. Other studies have shown that real average child support payments changed only modestly between the 1970s and the mid-1990s, so, for simplicity’s sake, the same 18 percent estimate was used for the 1970s and the 2000 calculations. Anne Case, I-Fen