FACT SHEET
The Effect of Sex & Gender on Women’s Lives

Contents:
Women & Violent Crime Victimization
Women & Poverty
Women & Human Rights Violations/Sexual Trafficking
Women & Reproductive Rights
Women & Healthcare

Women & Violent Crime Victimization

• According to a survey of homicide trends from 1976 to 2005, 25.1% of all homicide victims are women, yet 98% of those female homicides were perpetrated by men ¹
• Homicide is a leading cause of death among pregnant women outside of medical complications. Of all pregnancy-associated injury deaths identified in the study (1993), 617 (31.0%) women died as a result of homicide, and the pregnancy-associated homicide ratio was consistently higher in black women than in white women over the 9-year surveillance period ²
• Nine out of every 10 rape victims are female as of 2003 ³

• One out of every six American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime (14.8% completed rape; 2.8% attempted rape) ⁴
• Statistics show that the lifetime rate of rape is greater for women of color than for white women: white women 17.7%, African American women 18.8%, American Indian women 34.1, mixed race women, 24.4 ⁵
• Every two minutes, somewhere in America, someone is sexually assaulted ⁶

• In 1995, local child protection service agencies identified that of the 126,000 children who were victims of either substantiated or indicated sexual abuse, 75% were girls ⁷

Women & Poverty

• According to the most recent statistics available, in 2006 women still earn only 76.9 cents to the male dollar, and the gap between male and female wages actually widened between 2005 and 2006 ⁸
• Economist Evelyn Murphy, president of The Wage Project, estimates that over a lifetime (47 years of full-time work) the wage gap amounts to a loss in wages for a woman of $700,000 for a high school graduate , $1.2 million for a college graduate , $2 million for a professional school graduate ⁹
• Though, 51% of young women and 41% of young men had attended, or graduated from, some kind of college by 2003 ( U.S. Department of Education), one year out of college, women working fulltime earn only 80 percent as much as their male colleagues earn. Ten years after graduation, women fall farther behind, earning only 69 percent as much as men earn ¹⁰
• Poverty rates are highest for families headed by single women, particularly if they are black or Hispanic. In 2004, 28.4 percent of households headed by single women were poor, while 13.5 percent of households headed by single men and 5.5 percent of married-couple households lived in poverty. In 2004, both black and Hispanic female-headed households had poverty rates just under 40 percent ¹¹
• 20% of all U.S. families are headed by single mothers, while half of all the families living in poverty are headed by single mothers. The United States has the highest percentage of single-parent families (34% in 1998) among developed countries, followed by Canada (22%), Australia (20%), and Denmark (19%) ¹²

Women & Human Rights Violations/Sexual Trafficking

• The United States State Department estimates that 70% of the more than 820,000 men, women, and children that are trafficked across international border each year are women, the majority of women are victims of commercial sexual exploitation. ¹³
• The United Nations defines trafficking as “The recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs” ¹⁴
• The U.S. Government estimates that over 50,000 women and children are trafficked each year into the United States from Latin America, countries of the former Soviet Union, and Southeast Asia. ¹⁵

Women & Reproductive Rights

• Violent victimization and poverty are directly tied to a woman’s biological capacity to bear children. According to the Center for Disease Control, 32, 101 pregnancies of women were the result of rape in 2000, increasing the adult pregnancy rate associated with rape up to 4.7%. Given that rape can, and often does, result in pregnancy, violent crime can increase the likelihood that a woman will head a single-parent household, which further increases the likelihood of poverty ¹⁶
• Women who are trafficked into the United States each year also run the risk of sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy by rape and/or sexual slavery, which further increases their inability to escape their victimization and increases the likelihood physical disease, trauma and even death: “Untreated sexually transmitted infections may lead to serious consequences for long-term health. One such implication, pelvic inflammatory disease, may result in "infertility, ectopic pregnancy, chronic pelvic pain, and an increased risk of hysterectomy." ¹⁷
• According to the U.S. State department, it is “common for sex trafficking to result in pregnancy, a situation that frequently leads to forced abortions, according to a 2003 European Union study on the health consequences of human trafficking. Trafficked women are particularly vulnerable to post-abortion risks, such as incomplete abortion, sepsis (infections of the bloodstream), hemorrhaging, and intra-abdominal injury. These complications reportedly account for most maternal deaths. The study also found that many women exploited for commercial sex are given insufficient time to recuperate, thereby increasing the risk of post-abortion infection. ¹⁸

Women & Healthcare

• As of 2004, the second leading cause of death for women in the United States, 22%,  is cancer, many forms of which are directly tied to women’s reproductive systems, such a breast, uterine, ovarian, and cervical cancers.¹⁹
• According to the Centers for Disease Control, breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women, and breast cancer is the number one cause of cancer death in Hispanic Women. It is the second most common cause of cancer death in white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander, and American Indian/Alaska Native women. ²⁰