Older Women: Inequality at the Intersection of Age and Gender

The COVID pandemic drastically affected the lives of working women over the age of forty. This infographic provides global facts and statistics about the economic challenges that women face as they grow older, especially since 2020.

Older women often experience economic insecurity. They are less likely than men to have a pension. In addition to this, since the beginning of 2020, over forty percent of women between the ages of forty and sixty-five have lost job-based income. Fourteen percent of this age group lost their jobs entirely. Hispanic women were hardest hit with joblessness.

The intersections of age and gender make older women vulnerable. On average, women do over twice as much unpaid care and domestic work as men. That work increased during the pandemic for over half of women aged sixty or more. Also, over one-third of women experienced violence or knows someone who has experienced violence since the pandemic.

The intersecting discriminations that women experience in their lifetimes have a cumulative impact in old age that make their situation more vulnerable in a crisis.

SOURCE: UN Women and Women Count • LAST UPDATED: March 1, 2022