Wealth Gap Yawns–and So Do Media
Little interest in study of massive race/gender disparities

By Julie Hollar
FAIR – Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting
June 2010

The Insight Center for Community Economic Development (3/8/10) released a stunning report about the wealth gap for women of color: Single black women have a median wealth of $100 and Hispanic women of $120—dramatically lower than white men ($43,800), white women ($41,500) or black men ($7,900).


Insight Center for Community Economic Development, March 2010

The median wealth for single white women in their prime working years, age 36–49, is 61 percent of the wealth of their male counterparts, who own $70,030. That’s terrible, but the corresponding ratio between women and men of color is nearly off the charts, at just 0.05 percent—$5 versus $11,000. Almost half of single black and Hispanic women have zero or negative wealth. (Data was unavailable for Asian-American and Native American women.)

A racial wealth gap had been well established, as had a gender wealth gap. But the intersection of the two had never been measured, and the numbers in Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth and America’s Future, which demonstrate the compounding effects on women of color, are jarring and powerful. Yet almost more jarring is the near-complete lack of interest on the part of corporate media. According to a search of the Nexis database, the weeks following the report’s release witnessed one national television news mention, one NPR story, two opinion pieces which were republished in a few different papers, and a single newspaper report.

It’s not as if the Insight Center wasn’t trying; it even held a media briefing at the Capitol building in Washington followed by a day-long symposium on the issue (3/8/10). Remember Hurricane Katrina and corporate media vows to bring race and poverty back under their lens? The deafening media silence on the racial and gender wealth gap lays bare corporate media’s true priorities.

While income is the most common measurement for inequality, wealth—an individual’s assets minus their debts—reveals even greater disparities in the United States. While the top 1 percent received 21 percent of the income in 2006, it held over 34 percent of the wealth (UCSC.edu, 2/10). And racial disparities are drastically greater in terms of wealth than in terms of income. (See graph below.)


G. William Domhoff, "Wealth, Income, and Power," updated 4/10. Chart data Edward N. Wolff

Wealth can be more relevant to people’s lives, too, particularly in a time of economic crisis. Not only does wealth have a lot to do with the ability to retire or support yourself in old age, people of all ages are much more likely to lose their homes or otherwise find themselves unable to support themselves or their families without savings or assets to fall back on during economic hardship. And, indeed, women of color have had the highest foreclosure rates of any group during the current recession—both as a result of their lack of wealth and their being targeted for subprime mortgages, regardless of their income level (National Council of Negro Women, 6/09).

Wealth also helps people get ahead: Home equity can be borrowed against to send children to college, for example, and wealth can be passed down through the generations to provide them with more stability, access and options. Research has found that family wealth is the biggest predictor of the future economic status of a child, giving lie to the old American “bootstrapsâ€