Women’s Way is developing a Gender Wealth Index to better understand the gender wealth gap

Women’s Way is on a mission to find out what factors impact the gender wealth gap through its research project, the Gender Wealth Index.

This research was the main topic of the second annual Gender Wealth Summit, hosted by the Philly organization. The index will track the status and trends of women’s wealth-generating experiences over time in the Philadelphia region.

Read the research report

Diane Cornman-Levy, chief disrupter at Women’s Way, told Technical.ly there’s more data out there about the racial wealth gap than there is about the gender wealth gap. She said there also isn’t much data that considers both gender and race in the context of a wealth gap. Women’s Way wants to change that.

This spring, Women’s Way surveyed 409 women in the greater Philadelphia region — Philadelphia and the four suburban counties — over four weeks. Women’s Way consulted with women impacted by economic insecurity to review the survey and help shape the questions.

Kendrick B. Davis, lead researcher for this project, acknowledged that there is an over-representation of white women in the results. Approximately 72% of survey respondents were white, 19% were Black, 6% were Asian, 6% were Hispanic and the rest of the respondents identified as two or more races or some other race.

Kelly Sheard, director of the Gender Wealth Institute within Women’s Way, said this breakdown doesn’t represent enough of the demographics of people Women’s Way serves and people concentrated in the gender wealth gap.

Women’s Way’s immediate next focus is to develop a strategy to include more women of color in the survey. Cornman-Levy said they didn’t have a lot of time to administer the survey this spring, but they have a network of over 100 partners they can work with next time. Sheard added that they want to focus on organizations that specifically work with women of color.

This first round of surveys was also completely online and the org intends to create other methods of surveying to reach more people, Sheard said.

So far, Women’s Way raised $125,000 from the Green Family Foundation, $20,000 from Working for Women, $25,000 from the Leo Model Foundation and $15,000 from JPMorgan Chase to fund this research.

Cornman-Levy said they plan to raise more money as they move into year two of the project. She said she hopes companies that attended the Gender Wealth Summit will see the research and want to help.

One point that stood out to Cornman-Levy was the fact that women with the highest amount of student debt did not have a degree. She said it’s important to note this because it’s not good enough to just help people get into college, there must be support to help people finish college.

“We also know that going to college is not an equalizer for women, particularly women of color,” she said. “And also the people that have the highest debt are people with advanced degrees and the other data shows that their salaries don’t make up for that.”

Davis said it was impactful to see data that confirmed the idea of a gender wealth gap.

“We’ve gone through at least two and a half years of a pandemic and it’s affected people’s health, their economic choices, their jobs and career outcomes,” Davis said. “And the data tells us that people are still struggling. But the [Gender Wealth] Summit tells us that there are people still committed to resolving that struggle and moving women in the region in a more promising direction.”

With the first survey complete, Cornman-Levy said, Women’s Way is now working with stakeholders to define indicators for the research project.

The Gender Wealth Index sets out six dimensions, such as education, that can impact wealth accumulation, generation and extraction. Within each dimension will be a set of indicator questions to help understand where women fall within that dimension.

Bringing everything together, Women’s Way will develop the first iteration of a Gender Wealth Index and test it with wealth-building strategies, such as guaranteed income pilots. Women’s Way will ask these pilots to use the Gender Wealth Index and track changes in women’s wealth experiences through their pilot.

Davis said he is eager to get feedback from attendees at the Gender Wealth Summit about the research and what they think can be improved.

“Research can be used to help drive the conversation, as well as produce findings that will change policy,” Davis said.

Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.