Alaska women earn less than men, were imprisoned at a higher rate during the last decade and are committing suicide at a rate twice the national average, according to a new study released Tuesday.
"There were some shocking results, some disappointing results," said state Sen. Lesil McGuire, R-Anchorage, who requested the study from the Legislative Research Services. The request was made after McGuire said she reviewed the 2010 Alaska Victimization Survey, for which 1,000 Alaska women were interviewed.
Among its findings, the review found Alaska women make 77 cents for each dollar a man earns in full-time, year-round work. That's comparable to the national average, the study says. However, the figure drops to 67 cents on the dollar for women when both full- and part-time are included.
Nearly 56 percent of unmarried men with children under the age of 18 own their own home in Alaska. For a single mother, that rate drops to 42 percent.
According to the review, Alaska has the sixth-highest concentration of homeless people in the nation. Of all single people in shelters in 2012, a quarter of them were women. But 62 percent of all adults with children in a shelter were women. Domestic violence is the leading cause for homelessness in women.
Well that is an even more troubling picture of the difficulties faced by women in our state than even I realized.
I know that many women seem to suffer more than men with the lack of daylight during the winter months and have lived through many a depression cycle during my years as a married man. Up here they call that SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and it can get so bad that it has quite a lot to do with our increased suicide rate, drinking, and episodes of domestic violence,
I would assume that none of this is helped by the fact that the most prominent woman in our state is also a national laughingstock. Not exactly something that inspires women living in the Last Frontier to overcome adversity now is it?
0 comments:
Post a Comment