US Social Security Administration: The Marginalization Of Women

One government program I found was the Federal Women’s Program led by Pamela Pavek. According to http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/wa/about/civilrights/?cid=nrcs144p2_036407 , “ The Federal Women’s Program (FWP) is a special emphasis program which was established in 1963 to enhance employment and advancement of women. Executive Order 11478, signed in 1969, brought the FWP into the overall Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Program and placed it under the stewardship of the Director of EEO.” This program is to ensure that women receive equal treatment in all areas of the workplace. Also, they providing counseling and promoting leadership in the workplace as well.

Women's History that women of the teacher, nursing, hospital employee, librarians, and social worker field received only 52% of social security and Quadagno writes that women had the wrong end of the deal during Johnson's War on Poverty; whom had it worse than men with the Social Security

Being a high school student myself I do not have the fullest understanding of taxes or many government administrations at all but what I can say is I have a negative connotation to the Social Security Administration through my small amount of exposure to it through the media. When I researched it I was surprised by what I found. Despite my preset dispositions, the Social Security Administration seemed actually very helpful and I did not see where any hate could come from. Perhaps more interestingly I had read that it has been largely unchanged since it was first introduced in the 1930’s. The Social Security Act which created the Social Security Administration has positively affected our country.

The way that poverty affects elderly men and women is not the same or equal. Women over the age of 65 live in a poverty rate of about 21 percent, while men over the age of 65 is about 11 percent. Many reasons women are affected by poverty over men exist. For example, women take on fewer hours and take lower paying jobs than men do. While women do all of that, they also take primary responsibility in childbearing, child birth, and they do lots of unpaid work around the house such as cleaning, cooking, etc. With all of these reasons, women are at a big disadvantage to men in the pension system. It is said that women have longer life expectancies over men, which would result in them living longer than their spouses.

It was the year of 1934. America was fighting to come out from the worst economic crisis that the world would ever witness. It was also the year of high crime rate, low Gross Domestic Product and the lowest unemployment rate America had experienced. The Depression had paralyzed American labor forces, but there was a hope still alive in every American including J.D. Rockefeller when he said, “These are days when many are discouraged. In the 93 years of my life, depressions have come and gone. Prosperity has always returned and will again” (Rockefeller). At that time, the next president named Franklin D. Roosevelt, famous as FDR, brought Americans back to work through his confident efforts and new series of programs called ‘the New Deal’.

As we become older, issues with our health begin to take affect and finding ways to fund for that care is becoming even more difficult. In the article “Some Elders Must Take Drastic Measures to Obtain Long-term Care”, national magazine journalist Mary A. Fischer (2011) states that many Americans must face demeaning and disempowering choices in order to qualify for Medicaid or Medicare—federal funded health insurance programs— such as refusing to pay for a spouses institutionalization, divorce, and spending down assets. The author argues that these choices leave the healthy spouse with decreased funds to plan for their own retirement expense (Fisher, 2011). Working in the health care field for 4 years, along with my family’s own personal experiences I can relate to this article, since I have seen a variety of ways that federal funded health insurances have been unable to meet the expectations and demands of its beneficiaries.

Perhaps no group has as much at stake in the debate over Social Security reform as African Americans. Elderly African Americans are much more likely than their white counterparts to be dependent on Social Security benefits for most or all of their retirement income. Yet Social Security benefits are inadequate to provide for the retirement needs of the elderly poor, which leaves nearly 30 percent of African-American seniors in poverty.

The most important ways the 1935 Social Security Act was gendered, and why women reformers supported that legislation

The War on Poverty, including the growth in funding for Social Security and Medicare, has greatly impacted the senior population by reducing their poverty levels over the last half century. While poverty has been reduced for many in the senior population, is it still important to examine the corollaries of poverty for this population who is often seen as more economically secure due to fixed incomes and lower poverty rates than other population groups and thus frequently removed from discussions of poverty and its consequences. An important limitation of our current knowledge base is that there is limited research which focuses on senior experiences related to issues of poverty and the use of social service outside of Social Security and Medicare

First and foremost, despite slight recent increases in the amount of income obtained by members of the older population, their economic status is still quite perilous (Federal Interagency Forum, 2012).1 Men in this category have a median income of $27,707, while women continue to lag behind with a median income of $15,362 (AOA & AOCL, 2012). A vast majority of these individuals cite Social Security as their primary source for this income, amounting to 86-percent of the total older population (AOA & AOCL,

In Bonnie Smith-Yackel’s essay “My Mother Never Worked” she passionately defends her mother after Social Security refuses to grant her death benefit check. Yackel does not realize that Social Security fairly distributes benefits to contributing Americans. Social Security was reasonable to not granting benefits to a woman who never contributed as a wage earner. It would not be fair if benefits were granted to a fraud who never paid wage taxes compared to wage earners who do. Americans who abuse Social Security benefits by committing fraud is unethical and not to mention illegal. Americans that are in desperate need for Social Security benefits require it far more than frauds. By eliminating fraud the government can properly grant social benefits to hard working Americans. Social Security benefits should be permitted to Americans that work and provide back to their country or they are disabled. Hard-working citizens that pay their duties will receive back from benefits, including employees that are qualified as disabled. Benefits should not be granted to any citizen that makes no contribution to their country such as, tax deductions from their wages. Furthermore, Social Security needs to reach out to the majority which is the poverty-stricken. By informing impecunious people and immigrants of Social Security it could save them from the poverty they suffer from. Even though, Social Security relieves some citizens from a financial burden there are still many improvements to be

The Social Security System is in need of a new reform; our current system was not designed for the age stratification we have at this time. The U.S. Social Security Administration Office of Policy states, “The original Social Security Act, signed into law on August 14, 1935, grew out of the work of the Committee on Economic Security, a cabinet-level group appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt just one year earlier. The Act created several programs that, even today, form the basis for the government's role in providing income security, specifically, the old-age insurance, unemployment insurance, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) programs.” Social Security was modeled to aid the elderly citizens, however during the

In reading the book “Social Security and the Family” I learned a lot about the system that I had no idea about before. The book was fact filled and almost fun to read the need to know information. I gained much knowledge in the specifics of why the social security system is in need of reform, and why it will be inadequate in the years to come. One of the reasons our social security system isn’t working is because, “Social Security was modeled on the single-earner, married-couple family” (1). Times have changed dramatically since then.

There are a few different reasons for this phenomenon as illustrated by Gray and Heinsch (2009): “women feel that retirement planning is a male role, and that they will be taken care of; women find existing preretirement planning programs are generic, male or couple oriented, and do not address women’s specific needs and situations; women are traditionally ‘otherfocused’ and place their wellbeing behind nurturing others; and women may not feel they have a locus of control.” It is fascinating that these differences are illustrated, and they really make a lot of sense. The point about how women place their wellbeing behind nurturing others is really key; it is discussed so much in class about how women are often placed with the pressures of caring for their elderly parents or family. It is really interesting that this theme of caring for others seems to follow women up until and through their own retirement, when self-care is truly essential. It is really important as a social worker working with this population that women are reached out to and informed about the

Believe it or not there is a pay gap in-between a group of women itself. The pay gap worsens with age, the pay gap is 6% for women aged 25 to 35 but in women 60 and over the gap becomes a huge 38%. In 2013, women ages 55 to 64 years had median weekly earnings of $788. While the earnings for women in this age, group are higher than for women in other age groups, they are $212 less per week than the median weekly earnings of men ages 55 to 64 years, which is $1,000 per week for a gender earnings ratio of 78.8 percent. At the beginning of their working lives, the earnings of women and men are more similar; yet, even among the youngest workers, women earn less than men.” According to the Women’s Bureau Issue Brief. Also speaking to older women in my life such as my grandma about this subject, to see what