Previous 12 Month Earnings of Males and Females in Herkimer and Oneida Counties

Census data recently analyzed by the Pew Research Center show that a quarter of all moms now bring home more money than their male counterparts. According to an NBC News article  "Overall, women -- including those who are unmarried -- are now the leading or solo breadwinners in 40 percent of U.S. households, compared with just 11 percent in 1960.That’s both good news and bad news, depending on which end of the scale you examine. At the top level, educated women are catching up with men in the workforce. But at the bottom rungs, there are more single mothers than ever and most of them are living near the poverty line."

While Pew was able to get special runs done for them in analyzing the American Communities Survey (ACS) data from the Census Bureau, we unfortunately don't have that type of access. However there are some interesting data in the ACS that tells us about the earning power of local males and females.

The graph below shows the cumulative percentages of males and females in Herkimer and Oneida Counties who worked full time in the past 12 months by how much they earned. It is set up to show the percentage that earn less than several benchmark amounts. 

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So for example,  looking at the graph you can see that 84% of all Herkimer County females who worked full time in the past year earned less than $50,000 annually; in comparison, only 66.3% of Herkimer County males earned $50,000. What this shows, then, is that females in Herkimer County are more likely to earn lower salaries than males - or more specifically more of them are paid at a lower rate than their male counterparts. Another way to think of that same data is to say that only 16% of Herkimer County females make MORE than $50,000, versus 34% of Herkimer County males. So which group would you rather be a part of ?

Here's the data the above chart comes from.

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You can visit the Census Bureau's American Fact Finder to explore other income related data broken down by gender or race !

Female Mortality Rates Rise in Almost Half of US Counties Between 1992 and 2006

An article in The Incidental Economist  notes:

"There is a frightening graph in a recent article in Health Affairs by David Kindig and Erika Cheng. Kindig and Cheng looked at trends in male and female mortality rates from 1992–96 to 2002–06 in 3,140 US counties. What they found was that female mortality rates increased in 42.8% of counties (male mortality rates increased in only 3.4%). The counties are mapped below: red means that female mortality worsened. You can see a strong regional pattern: just about every county showed had worsened female mortality in several southern states, while no county showed such decline in New England. There are many questions about what explains this pattern. For example, did healthier women migrate out of the south from 1992 to 2006? Nevertheless, the map depicts a shocking pattern of female hardship, primarily in the southeast and midwest."

Click on the map to enlarge the view and note that central New York appears to fall into what Kindig and Cheng refer to as counties with "minimal improvement" in female mortality rates.

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