You’ve heard it before. Women earn less than men – they pay harsher penalties in the workplace when pursuing parenthood – they also often struggle more with debt and save less for retirement. But as pointed out by Bloomberg, there’s at least one area of personal finance in which single women are outpacing their male counterparts in America – homeownership.
Roughly a century after the publication of Virginia Woolf’s essay regarding the urgent need for women to have a private physical place in which to flourish – an essay entitled A Room of One’s Own, single women are purchasing homes in larger proportions than men. According to data from the National Association of Realtors, single women now account for 17 percent of homebuyers in the U.S. Single men only account for 7 percent.
There are many factors at work. For instance, single women are more likely than single men to be parenting on their own, and therefore more likely to seek stable housing for raising children. There are roughly nine million single-mother households in America, more than three times the number of single father households according to the Pew Research Center.
