There are currently more than 51 million single, separated, divorced, or widowed women in the United States.  Unmarried women are also one of the fastest growing demographic groups. 

Today, nearly half of all adult women are unmarried, which represents part of a broader societal transformation in which the traditional two-parent, one-worker family is no longer the norm.   Marriage is now more than ever more an institution for the privileged: those with higher education and the highest salaries.  Yet, generations of social focus on marriage makes many government-bestowed benefits inaccessible.

The fact is, our society, our families, and our workforce have changed, but workplace and public policies have not kept pace to reflect these transformations.  Today’s workforce is comprised of employees with diverse family structures and changing life responsibilities.  Single workers, with and without children, are now an important employee cohort that has rightly called attention to the need for family-friendly policies in the workplace. 

The workplace now includes an increasing number of unmarried women, unmarried co-habiting couples, married people w/o children, and single-parent families.  The prevalence of single workers and their diverse life circumstances means that workforce policies should address their needs.  Indeed, we need to pay attention to the different ways that women are living their lives, and establish policies that will enable unmarried women to take care of themselves and their families. 

In doing so, however, we must also recognize that very notion of balancing work and life is a luxury that many people cannot afford.   For low- income workers, undocumented workers, and people working multiple jobs just to scrape by, policies like flex-time and family leave simply do not exist.  We should therefore be crafting policies that support all workers as they try to meet the many demands of life in and out of work.

Finally, we must also not forget about the millions of single women who are out of work and who are truly struggling in these tough economic times.  According to the October unemployment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:  Sixty-one percent of all unemployed women workers were unmarried.  That means 3.3 million unmarried women (age 20 and over) were unemployed.  For unmarried women who head families, the unemployment rate was 12.6 percent, 2.4 points above the national average.  For these women, we must focus on policies that can help them find work in jobs that can support not only them, but their families.