(lively music) - [Lindsay Goldman] Aging's a lot harder for women.

Women live longer than men.

Women have higher rates of physical and cognitive disability.

- Many of us are living alone.

It gets a little lonesome.

You can sometimes get a little depressed, and it affects your memory.

- Women face a lot of health challenges, economic challenges and a lot of times there aren't the services and supports available that would make it easier for them.

- I make just enough that I don't qualify for assistance.

You make just enough where you're don't qualify, but not enough where you can get by on your own.

- More than half of single older women do not have enough money to meet their basic needs.

- It's hard for me to untangle the financial from the health.

Those have been the two that have impacted my life the most as a family caregiver.

- [Lindsay] There are a number of things that need to happen to make our society more age and gender friendly.

We need better informed attitudes and stronger institutions, programs and policies that address the intersection of aging and gender.

If you care about women, aging's a women's issue.

- [Announcer] Major funding for "Aging Matters" is provided by the West End Home Foundation, enriching the lives of older adults through grant making, advocacy and community collaboration, the Jeanette Travis Foundation, dedicated to improving the health and wellbeing of the Middle Tennessee community, the HCA Healthcare Foundation on behalf of Tristar Health, Cigna, together all the way.

Additional funding provided by Jackson National Life Insurance Company, the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee and by members of NPT.

Thank you.

- I'm Lindsay Goldman.

I'm the Chief Executive Officer of Grantmakers in Aging.

Our mission is to mobilize social, intellectual and financial capital to improve the experience of aging now and in the future.

And we do the work that we do because aging's universal.

We are aging at the intersection of multiple identities and in relation to the people around us and our environments.

And a society that connects, engages and cares for people at every age is a stronger, healthier, more productive society.

Aging's harder for women.

Our institutions, our policies, our programs were designed when people just didn't live this long.

- As of November the 21st, I'll be 82 years old.

I have two daughters and they live in the DC, Maryland area.

Kim is the eldest.

I do not have any family here in Nashville, but I have close friends.

You can tell that's some time ago 'cause that's when my hair was black.

Now it's all white.

- The life expectancy gender gap has actually increased over the last couple of years.

It had been decreasing, but it's now larger than it's been since 1996, 79.1 years for women, 73.2 years for men.

- [Audrey] My husband and I as we had just gotten married at Pickett Chapel Church in Lebanon, Tennessee.

- So, women often outlive their partners, which means that they live alone.

They're single-income households, and it will cost more money.

- The years go fast.

It is so important to have friends close by to check on you, particularly if you live alone and family members are not in the city because as you age, there could be accidents like falling.

- [Lindsay] As a result of living longer, women have higher rates of physical and cognitive disability.

- Women are much more likely to become frail than men.

They develop the sarcopenia, the weakness, a lot easier.

And then along with that is the cognition.

Some of these changes with aging, that's what we see.

We see changes at the cellular level in the brain.

We see shrinkage of the size of the brain, the areas where in the brain that are responsible for short-term memory.

- You know, me being in my eighties just interacting with other people helps your memory.

Many of us are living alone and when you are staying at home alone, it gets a little lonesome.

You can sometimes get a little depressed and it affects your memory.

- Women are more likely to live alone in later life, often because they have outlived partners, friends.

Living alone does not necessarily mean that one is socially isolated, but it is one of several risk factors for social isolation, which we know has very severe physical and mental health implications.

- We need to have some socialization.

It's just so important to have some connection to friends or neighbors or somebody.

It helps for safety reasons and for memory and just to have somebody to call on if you need somebody.

That's important.

- One of the predictors of poverty is living alone.

So, being single or divorced or widowed, all of those things make it more likely that an older adult will age into poverty.

And that's something that women face by virtue of the fact that they are more likely to live longer and live alone.

So, you just have a lot more older adult women who are living alone and who don't have kind of that second source of income.

- [Lindsay] Aging is expensive as a woman and as a result, many women are financially insecure.

- I make just enough that I don't qualify for food stamps, just enough where I don't qualify for assistance.

You know, it's one of those you make just enough where you're don't qualify, but not enough where you can get by on your own.

- When we talk about poverty, people are often talking about that poverty line, which is so low.

It's like under $14,000 for an individual, which is not enough for anybody to be even close to economically secure.

And that is the measure of whether or not you're eligible for various kinds of assistance.

I am the managing director of economic security at Justice in Aging, and we focus our work on advocacy for low-income older adults.

We in particular look at the challenges of groups that have historically been marginalized or have not been close to justice.

And so, women, people of color, LEP individuals (Limited English Proficient individuals), LGBTQ+ older adults, and really just looking at the challenges that they are facing as they age.

The things that we are looking at are not necessarily about the poverty line, it's about economic security.

And so one of the things that we talk about is the measure of economic security.

And we think looking at things like the elder index is also really important because that's a way that we can decide whether the programs that exist are actually meeting the needs of the older adult population.

- [Lindsay] The index gives us the true cost of living for older adults in every county in America.

And it tells us that more than half of single, older women do not have enough money to meet their basic needs.

And there are much higher rates of disability and financial insecurity for single women of color, particularly Black women and Latinas.

And for women who identify as lesbian or transgender - Women of color face the additional burden of having to deal with discrimination on multiple levels.

And the same is true for LGBTQ women.

You know, you have kind of the sex discrimination that women are facing, and then you compound that with racial discrimination and gender identity discrimination and all of these other layers.

And that's one of the reasons that we see women of color having poverty rates in older age that's twice the rate of white women.

It's just another layer within our systems and the structures of our society that make it more difficult for them to be economically secure as they age.

- That's why the elder index is useful for us because it can show us not only the people who are living below the federal poverty level, but also the people who are struggling to make ends meet, but who are above the federal poverty level.

And as a result, they don't qualify for benefits and entitlements.

- [Instructor] So you're gonna take the front of your cloth here and you're gonna roll it up to the ears.

Take your rubber band and wrap it around the base.

Kind of shape the ears up.

That's perfect, Bonnie.

You got it.

Excellent.

- [Bonnie] That's part of the reason I started going to FiftyForward.

They looked into seeing what kind of services I could qualify for.

They tried to help me qualify for 'em.

When I couldn't qualify for food stamps or the food services and everything, then they got me into their program.

- [Lindsay] So, the Older Americans Act provides some funding for programs and services delivered by the Aging Network.

And the Aging Network delivers things like Meals on Wheels and case management and senior center services, all of the traditional services that are not covered by the healthcare system, but are so essential to good health.

And so there is a network in place, but this is a network that is significantly under-resourced.

There are long waiting lists.

They simply don't have the capacity to address the need.

- The kind of things I could use help with is food.

That's one of the things FiftyForward does for me.

They give me a food bag every week that has some frozen meals in it that I can eat and some cans of stuff.

- There needs to be a lot more of a focus on services for older adults.

I was reading something recently that talked about the percentage of dollars federally that goes toward older adult services, and it's very low.

We need to sort of elevate the conversation about what the opportunities are and how we're gonna solve this problem.

- People have to make really hard choices between the cost of buying food, the cost of rent, the cost of medicine.

(somber music) - [Tracey] Oftentimes, people don't expect that there will be quite as many financial challenges as there are.

Cost of living is going up and inflation and things like that.

So people may find that as they're getting older it's becoming more and more difficult to be economically secure.

Lots of different things can happen that cause people to age into poverty in a way that they didn't expect.

- I'm a diabetic, and it's very hard to control my diabetes.

Part of that is because of the food I can get, the food I can afford.

It's not always the best thing for me to be eating.

My blood sugar goes up and down.

I'm trying to get better control of it, but it's hard.

It's hard for me to afford to buy the correct foods to eat as a diabetic because I'm spending so much on my meds and everything, and I make a limited amount of money a month.

Even with insurance, my copays are ridiculous.

It makes it tough.

- It is hard for me to untangle the financial from the health.

I think they're interrelated.

And so those have been the two that have impacted my life the most as a family caregiver.

- Women are more likely to be caregivers, caregivers of older people, of young children, of grandchildren.

And that can be extremely gratifying, but also exhausting and expensive.

Women and men have different rates of labor force participation, and a lot of that has to do with caregiving responsibilities.

Women often have to leave the workforce to care for aging parents and loved ones.

- We end up being the family caregivers the majority of the time because of how family structures evolved over the centuries.

We're coming out of the periods where women were at home.

- [Lindsay] As a society, we need to adapt to the roles that women have taken on outside of the house.

- The women who are out of the workforce or who are doing flexible jobs so that they can have the ability to take care of children or spouses are losing retirement income.

And so social security looks at 35 years of work history, and every time that is a zero year or it's a lower wage year, that reduces the benefits that women receive when they retire.

(somber music) - Having worked in long-term care for decades, it was very important for me that I not completely emerge myself into this family caregiving role.

The first year or so I probably did, and that was the year that led to what I would consider the next year of financial crisis because I had spent so much time focused on my parents.

But you can't get back that lost period.

You cannot.

- It's really reflective of that idea of caregiving being undervalued that we don't count any of that time.

And then women, once they age, are penalized for the fact that they provided that kind of care.

- So it's not just the present, 'cause what I don't think that folks realize is that this impacts your future.

And so, I look at it at the macro level.

So, this is actually and has impacted my future.

And then I'm a single woman, and I'm a single Black woman.

(Vikie laughing) Okay, and then you need to take it out for Monday, too.

You're already set up.

So I'm gonna actually shut Sunday and Monday.

Okay, and then also take out the blood thinner.

- This one.

- That's the blood pressure.

- And if people didn't provide that care, there are tremendous costs to healthcare and social insurance programs.

So, it is much more expensive to care for someone in an institution than it is to care for them at home.

But that is because the costs are being incurred by women in private.

(tense music) - That's that decrease in income.

It's the stressors related to trying to work and also be a family caregiver.

And then on the health side, there's just less time for you that ultimately impacts your health and wellbeing.

And so, I have noted exacerbation of a chronic condition that I have that sometimes it's not as well managed as it should be because I am not getting enough rest or not eating right.

Unless you are among the 5% wealthiest folks in this country and can afford to buy all of those services, whether they be institutional-based or be in your home, somebody in your family will experience these challenges.

Now, I have seen situations from my career where there might be a family of five siblings.

One carries the load.

Usually it's the female that carries the load.

- Whoever is providing that care should be incentivized and compensated in some way for providing that care, which ultimately saves healthcare and social insurance costs.

- So there's an idea to provide some value to the work that women are doing and caregivers in general are doing around social security benefits.

And it's a caregiver credit that would basically count the time that caregivers are spending providing childcare, providing care for parents or spouses so that those don't just look like zero years in terms of what people's social security benefits will be when they retire.

And this is a really important idea because otherwise caregivers are really losing income and not able to have the retirement benefits that they would have otherwise had if they had not been acting in this caregiver role.

- As a professional, also as a daughter who has now had this lived experience of being a family caregiver, I have a body of knowledge that I didn't have before.

For me not to take those lessons learned of where it could have been less stressful for me, I want to pass that on.

That's why kind of I think we need to be honest and that everybody doesn't age the same.

And so, when we have these broad programs that doesn't take into the variations of aging based on the socioeconomic status and the race, then we're missing the target.

- The thing that we have been pushing for the most is using the existing programs in a way that's more effective.

So, taking the programs that are supposed to provide support and assistance to older adults and women and people who have low incomes and really expanding them out so that they reach more people and that the people who should be eligible are able to access the programs.

One of the things that we work on is looking at barriers to access because there are are programs that people just don't know exist.

So, providing information and assistance and making sure that the barriers to access are not there so that people can more easily access the programs.

- These are really big problems and we all need to care about them because we're all aging and our lives are interconnected.

So as a society, we need to adapt to longevity and to the roles that women have taken on outside of the house.

But change is hard.

Philanthropy is helping to catalyze some of this change by funding research and advocacy, by testing new models and spreading new ideas.

There are a number of things that need to happen to make our society more age and gender friendly.

We need age-friendly healthcare.

Healthcare that is aligned with what actually matters to older people.

We need affordable and accessible housing, housing that is well integrated into communities.

And more generally, we need age-integrated communities.

We need family leave policies so that women are not penalized when they care for loved ones.

We need affordable and accessible childcare.

Without childcare, women cannot work.

And finally, social security credits for time spent caregiving.

- I think a really important thing that people can do is reach out to their members of Congress.

We hear oftentimes that members of Congress don't think this is an issue that people really are thinking about or know about or care about.

And so, when they hear from their constituents that this is important and that it's a priority, that actually bumps it up in terms of the things that they're willing to fight for and the things that they're willing to push for change on.

- It's important that we consider a life course perspective when looking at policies, programs, systems, institutions that can accommodate all of us as we age.

- [Narrator] You can watch the entire "Aging Matters" series at our website, wnpt.org/agingmatters.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Major funding for "Aging Matters" is provided by the West End Home Foundation, enriching the lives of older adults through grant making, advocacy and community collaboration, the Jeanette Travis Foundation, dedicated to improving the health and wellbeing of the Middle Tennessee community, the HCA Healthcare Foundation on behalf of Tristar Health, Cigna, together all the way.

Additional funding provided by Jackson National Life Insurance Company, the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee and by members of NPT.

Thank you.

(lively music)