Allstate insurance has a full page ad on the back of the business section of today’s New York Times. It has a cartoon of a woman in a business suit chained to a rock. Here’s the first two paragraphs of text:
The number of women over 65 who are still working has increased by more than a third in the past ten years. Why are retirement-age women increasingly chained to their jobs?
Well, women live longer than men, so their retirement savings have to stretch father. Women earn less – 77 cents for every dollar a man earns – so they save less. And they work fewer years – the average woman spends 11 years out of the workforce caring for children or elderly parents.
- What happened to the number of men over 65 still working? Suppose that has risen by 50%?
- Who says they are chained to their jobs? Maybe they are living a full rewarding life working part-time.
- Women used to make a lot less than 77 cents on the dollar. I seem to remember 40 or 50 cents. Seems like they’re doing better, not worse?
- Nothing in the second paragraph relates to the first. The first is about change over the last ten years. Women live longer, but has that changed in the last ten years? Do they take more time out of the workforce than they used to? Do they make more than they used to?
So the evidence doesn’t relate to the summary, and then the summary is given a pejorative spin that’s unsupported.
Oh, by the way, the main fact? Not so much.
The number of women over 65 who are still working has increased 38 percent since 1980
In 28 years it’s gone up 38%, but Allstate says it’s gone up over a third in the last ten years? Fishy.