Member of the Maine Permanent Commission on the Status of Women, Jennifer Wilkey, works as a woodworker. (Courtesy of the Maine Permanent Commission on the Status of Women)
Women in Maine are more likely than men to experience poverty regardless of employment status, the Maine Permanent Commission on the Status of Women concluded in its 2024 biennial report.
The report, which was released on Thursday, used publicly available data to assess the economic security of women in Maine, finding that gender disparities persist in part due to disproportionate caregiving responsibilities and insufficient access to services such as affordable, high-quality child and elder care.
In Maine, as well as nationally, unpaid caregiving work largely falls on women. That responsibility is a barrier to paid employment and negatively impacts women’s personal finances and the state’s economy as a whole, the report found. For women who are employed, they are also more likely to receive lower pay or do part-time work in order to provide unpaid care for family members.
“These are not new issues,” said the commission’s executive director Elinor Higgins, “but they’re still extremely prevalent.”
Due to several factors, including the opioid epidemic, grandparents are increasingly becoming the primary caregivers for their grandchildren. That is the case for 5,000 Maine grandparents, but the responsibility more often falls on grandmothers, according to the report.
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“That is particularly challenging for older women who have these lower retirement savings or who are still in the workforce but are working these lower paying jobs and are suddenly responsible for a kid again,” Higgins said.
Maine women over the age of 75 live in poverty at twice the rate of men, which the report concludes shows the gender wage gap creates financial disparities that have impacts across a woman’s lifespan.
Higgins and the 15-member commission offer recommendations to address this inequality, including ensuring existing entities dedicated to this work are well resourced and creating new policies and programming that support Maine caregivers.
“We’re not planning to submit any legislation specifically ourselves, but some of the recommendations we lift up have to do with bills that are anticipated to go forward,” Higgins said.
A particular challenge is the expiration of COVID-19 pandemic-era funding, Higgins said, which buoyed many programs. Maine is also facing a projected revenue shortfall of approximately $187 million. While legislative leaders have outlined intentions to keep initiatives championed in recent years intact, lawmakers will have to figure out a way to fill the deficit and Gov. Janet Mills has already vowed a lean budget.
By the numbers
Full-time women workers in Maine make roughly 83% of what men make.
The median annual gap in earnings between men and women in the state is $10,123, according to 2018-2022 American Community Survey estimates. The median annual earnings of men who are full time, year-round workers is $58,619, whereas for women it’s $48,496.
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And, this gap widens depending on various aspects of a person’s identity, including for mothers, women of color, disabled women, LGBTQ+ women, as well as transgender and non-binary Mainers.
Black populations have the highest poverty rates in the state, followed closely by American Indian or Alaska Native populations. Research shows the Wabanaki Nations — the Penobscot Nation, Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, Mi’kmaq Nation and Passamaquoddy Tribe — lag behind the rest of the state’s citizens in a variety of key socioeconomic indicators.
The report also found higher rates of poverty among women living in rural areas, with the highest percentage of women below the poverty line in Washington County and Somerset County.
While many states have seen employment rates among women increase, that percentage for women in Maine hasn’t grown significantly over the past 20 years, the report concluded.
Overall, women in Maine participate in the labor force at a lower rate than men. According to estimates from the 2023 American Community Survey, 76.3% of women participate in the state’s labor force compared with 83.6% men.
Women in Maine are also more likely than men to be employed part-time. According to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2023 74% of working women worked full time and 26% worked part time. This is compared to 83% of working men who worked full time and 17% who worked part time.
The direct care workforce
Women are more likely to work part-time roles or drop out of the workforce altogether in order to care for family members when such services aren’t available.
And more than 23,500 hours of care that Mainers are entitled to goes undelivered every week, though this figure is likely an underestimate when accounting for reporting inadequacies and people who do not qualify for public programs, a report from the Maine Center for Economic Policy found earlier this year.
Women are also more likely to need this care themselves later in life, as women generally live longer than men.
At the same time, women make up the vast majority of direct care workers, often seeing low wages when they are paid for care work. An earlier report from MECEP found that low pay and poor benefits led to high poverty, turnover and burnout among direct care workers in Maine.
This issue sits at the nexus of Maine’s aging population, our societal undervaluing of care work, and our reliance on women to step in when systems fall short.
– Maine Permanent Commission on the Status of Women 2024 report
While the commission recommends encouraging women to join higher paying fields, such as construction, as a tool for tackling the gender wage gap, it emphasized that this still leaves the state’s need for direct care workers unmet, as the industry is experiencing a tight labor market.
“This issue sits at the nexus of Maine’s aging population, our societal undervaluing of care work, and our reliance on women to step in when systems fall short,” the report reads.
Another key driver of women dropping out of the work force or opting for part-time work is the high cost of child care. In addition to affordability, there are not enough licensed child care slots in Maine to provide care and education for all the children who need it.
“We encourage the continued pursuit of higher wages for care professions, education and healthcare, and we encourage opportunities to explore and pilot financial supports,” Higgins said.
One example of the latter is piloting guaranteed income programs, which could be modeled off of existing programs such as Quality Housing Coalition’s Project HOME Trust, Higgins said. That project provides direct monthly payments of $1,000 to 20 mothers for one year and provides training on budgeting, building credit and other financial planning.
“There is interest in what that could look like in rural communities,” Higgins said.
A throughline of the report is a recommendation for the state to provide more education and outreach about existing programs to ensure Mainers know about and use them.
Lawmakers have passed new state investments in child and direct care in recent years.
Such investments include the Child Care Affordability Program, which helps families pay for the cost of childcare. However, as of November 30, the Office of Child and Family Services had to implement a waitlist to stay within the available federal funding.
Maine’s Office of Aging and Disability Services and the state’s five Area Agencies on Aging began providing Respite for ME Grants in 2022 to family caregivers of people living with Alzheimer’s Disease and related Dementias.
Another investment is the state’s expansion of the Medicare Savings Program, which aims to help low-income retirees by raising the threshold for income eligibility.
While the commission recommends more education about these programs, it also calls for the state to ensure such programs and the agencies that provide them are adequately funded.
Discrimination and violence
The commission also recommends that state agencies, such as the Maine Human Rights Commission and the Maine Department of Labor, have the resources that they need to enforce laws already on the books.
Of the employment cases filed with the Maine Human Rights Commission, which receives and investigates complaints of unlawful discrimination, almost one in three are related to sex discrimination or sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination, or both.
While sexual harassment in the workplace often goes unreported, anywhere from 25% to 85% of women report experiencing it nationally, according to the U.S. National Plan to End Gender-Based Violence. Further, the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence found that 62% of domestic violence survivors reported that their abusive partners made it difficult for them to continue working at their current place of employment.
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Gender-based discrimination in the workplace also includes wage discrimination. The report highlights an example from 2022, when Maine clinical psychologist Clare Mundell won a discrimination case in which she was being paid half as much as her male colleagues.
“One of the big takeaways is around intersectional discrimination,” Higgins said.
The commission found that when someone is impacted by discrimination, they are often impacted by multiple forms of discrimination at the same time.
For example, 15% of sex discrimination cases also included age discrimination charges and 35% of sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination cases also included disability discrimination charges.
Last session, the Maine Legislature considered adding to the state infrastructure that investigates discrimination. Former House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross proposed legislation to create a Civil Rights Unit to investigate complaints about possible violations of the Maine Civil Rights Act, however it did not become law.
Beyond state action, Higgins said the commission is encouraging employers to develop policies that support workers who are survivors of gender-based or domestic violence, such as accepting the confidential address of an employee enrolled in Maine’s Address Confidentiality Program, under which addresses of participants aren’t listed in public data records but are instead kept by the Secretary of State’s Office.
The commission’s last biennial report in 2022 flagged the difficulty in obtaining data on the needs of women, particularly when it comes to capturing the experiences of small population groups in Maine that experience some of the starkest disparities, such as those living in rural areas, women of color, women with disabilities and older women. The imperfect nature of current data systems was a continued challenge mentioned in the latest 2024 report.
Higgins said the commission is working with the Department of the Secretary of State, the Department of Administrative and Financial Services and the Permanent Commission on the
Status of Racial, Indigenous, and Tribal Populations to advance more interoperable and equitable data systems in state government that can better capture the experiences of Mainers.
“That is a long-term idea and it could be a challenge,” Higgins said, but added, a statewide plan for data governance, “that’s a key part of this.”
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