Markets in a Minute

Female Breadwinners Have Doubled, But Barriers Remain

Published

2 years ago

March 4, 2020

Dorothy Neufeld

This Markets in a Minute chart is available as a poster.

female breadwinners

This Markets in a Minute chart is available as a poster.

The Rise of Female Breadwinners

Who is the higher income earner in your family?

Over time, the U.S. has seen a rise in female breadwinners. In fact, the proportion of women who earn more than their male partners has almost doubled since 1981.

Today’s Markets in a Minute chart–from New York Life Investments–illustrates the historical trajectory of women’s earning power, as well as systemic challenges women still face.

Then and Now: Gaining Ground

In the last 40 years, there has been considerable progress in both the percentage and number of female breadwinners.

	1981	1991	2001	2011	2018
% Female Breadwinners	16%	21%	24%	28%	29%
# Female Breadwinners	4.1M	6.5M	8.1M	8.8M	9.6M

For families that had dual incomes, only 16% of households in 1981 had a female breadwinner. This was equal to about 4 million women across the country at the time.

Fast-forward to the present, and close to 10 million married, female breadwinners were part of the U.S. labor pool in 2018.

Breakthroughs Could Link to Education

Higher education rates and rising earning power are helping to decouple women from pre-existing financial stereotypes.

For married female breadwinners*, the impact of education often plays out as follows:

Education level	% of Women Earning Equal or More Than Partner
More education than partner	49%
Same education as partner	29%
Less education than partner	20%

Source: Pew Research Center
*Over age 25

The odds of a woman earning the same or more than her partner skyrockets nearly 250% if she has more education, compared to if she has less education.

Interestingly, when it comes to career trajectories, women and men share similar decision-making rationales. Among surveyed women, 83% were more likely to delay having kids in order to advance their careers, compared to 79% of men. The primary reason: to help secure a stronger financial standing for their future children.

While it is clear that women have become a growing financial force over time, they still face many persistent challenges today.

A Chorus of Systemic Barriers

Women experience a litany of headwinds, both overt and subtle. What are some variables that continue to have a pervasive impact on women’s finances?

Media Bias
According to one study, 65% of media language directed towards women and their finances surrounded “excessive spending”. In contrast, 70% of language towards men discussed “making money” as a masculine ideal.

Financial Well-being
According to a global survey, 85% of women manage day-to-day expenses as much as or more than their spouse. However, 58% of women defer long-term financial and investment decisions to their husbands.

Gender Wage Gap
Based on the median salary for all men and women, women earn 79 cents for every dollar men make in 2019. The gap starts small and continues to grow as people age. How can women close the gap? The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce has some advice:

Get one more degree
Pick a high-paying college major, such as the STEM fields
Negotiate starting pay

If current earning trends continue, women will not receive equal pay until 2059.

Leadership Roles
While more women are in the workforce compared to previous generations, they tend to be in lower positions.

Women in S&P 500 Companies

Role	Women's Representation in Role
CEOs	5.8%
Top Earners	11.0%
Board Seats	21.2%
Executive/Senior-Level Officials and Managers	26.5%
First/Mid-Level Officials and Managers	36.9%
Total Employees	44.7%

Why are there so few women CEOs? Men dominate management roles that influence the company’s bottom line, such as COO or sales. On the other hand, female executives typically fill roles in areas like human resources or legal—which rarely lead to a CEO appointment.

The Road Ahead

The last 40 years have shown immense progress, yet there is still plenty of room for further advancement.

Women belong in all places where decisions are being made… It shouldn’t be that women are the exception.

—Ruth Bader Ginsburg, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

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Markets in a Minute

Data Centers: Investing in the Infrastructure of the Future

Infrastructure refers to any asset that provides an essential service. In today’s interconnected world, data centers are exactly that.

Published

5 days ago

September 23, 2021

Marcus Lu

This infographic is available as a poster.

Data Centers: Investing in the Infrastructure of the Future

Digital transformation is one of the world’s most prominent trends today.

For evidence, consider the growth in internet users worldwide. By 2023, 5.3 billion people (66% of population) will be using the internet, up from 3.9 billion (51% of population) in 2018.

This growth has resulted in an incredible amount of data being produced each day, whether its from streaming music on Spotify or buying goods on Amazon. But how is all this data being processed?

In this Markets in a Minute chart from New York Life Investments, we shed light on the importance of data centers, and why they should be considered as core infrastructure.

The Role of the Data Center

A data center is a facility that stores, processes, and disseminates data. There are thousands of them around the world, and collectively, they’re referred to as the “cloud”.

This puts data centers at the center of nearly everything we do online: e-commerce, communications, storage and back-up, and even online gaming. To gain a better sense of what this all looks like, the following table breaks down the storage capacity of the world’s data centers.

Segment	2016 Storage Capacity (exabytes)	2021 Storage Capacity (exabytes)
Compute	160	470
Collaboration	170	400
Database & analytics	150	380
Enterprise resource planning	180	420
Video streaming	50	180
Social networking	60	160
Search engine	30	100
Other consumer apps	70	190
Total	870	2,300

Source: Statista (2021)

One exabyte is equal to one billion gigabytes, which means the world currently has 2.3 trillion gigabytes of total storage.

The largest segment is compute instances, which are cloud-based workstations used by data scientists. At the lower end of the scale are segments like video streaming (includes Netflix and Hulu) and social networking (think Facebook or LinkedIn).

Cloud Spending Reaches a Historic Milestone

For businesses that create and use data, moving to the cloud (as opposed to maintaining their own servers) has plenty of advantages like cost savings, flexibility, and security.

This is driving exponential growth in cloud infrastructure spending, which reached a record $130 billion in 2020. At the same time, spending on data center hardware decreased from $96 to $90 billion. These results are partly attributed to COVID-19, which forced many businesses to switch to a work-from-home operating model.

A survey conducted by 451 Research found that 40% of businesses had increased their usage of cloud services during the pandemic. In addition, 85% of those who were impacted indicated that the move would be a permanent one.

Data Centers are Infrastrcture

The scope of an infrastructure investor has historically been limited to companies in construction, energy, and transportation.

But what defines infrastructure?

It’s any physical system that is vital for an economy’s development and prosperity—and in a world where over 5 billion people are expected to be online by 2023, the data center is the perfect embodiment of that.

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Markets in a Minute

Sustainable Investing Assets Worldwide (2018-2020)

From 2018-2020, global sustainable investing assets grew by 15% to reach $35.3 trillion. Here’s how they break down across five major markets.

Published

3 weeks ago

September 9, 2021

Jenna Ross

This infographic is available as a poster.

Sustainable Investing Assets Worldwide (2018-2020)

Sustainable investing is top-of-mind for many investors, but how fast is it actually growing?

Between 2018 and 2020, global sustainable investing assets grew 15% to reach $35.3 trillion. This works out to more than a third of total assets under management.

In this Markets in a Minute from New York Life Investments, we explore the value and growth of sustainable investing assets across five major markets.

What is Sustainable Investing?

Sustainable investing considers environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors in portfolio selection and management. For the purposes of this data, it is a broad definition that includes seven main approaches:

ESG integration
Corporate engagement & shareholder action
Norms-based screening
Negative/exclusionary screening
Best-in-class/positive screening
Sustainability themed/thematic investing
Impact and community investing

In most regions, it is becoming increasingly common to combine several of the above strategies within the same product.

Sustainable Investing Assets by Region

Sustainable investment data comes from five major markets: the U.S., Europe, Japan, Canada, and Australasia. Currencies have been converted to U.S. dollars at the prevailing exchange rate at the day of reporting. We’ve based growth rates on U.S. dollar values.

Here is the value of sustainable investing assets in U.S dollars, sorted by asset amounts in 2020.

Region	2018	2020	Growth Rate
United States	$12.0T	$17.1T	42%
Europe	$14.1T	$12.0T	-15%
Japan	$2.2T	$2.9T	32%
Canada	$1.7T	$2.4T	43%
Australasia	$734B	$906B	23%

All 2020 assets are reported as of December 31, 2019 except for Japan which reports as of March 31, 2020. Australasia is Australia and New Zealand. In 2020, Europe includes: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, the UK, Norway, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein.

The U.S. makes up almost half of global sustainable investment assets, and saw the second highest growth rate. One strong theme in the country is racial justice investing. Over 120 investors and organizations signed a call to action for the investment community to dismantle systemic racism and promote racial equity and justice. They plan to achieve this through various actions, such as hiring people of color and financing Black entrepreneurs.

Europe makes up over a third of all sustainable investing assets. The region has seen important regulatory developments, such as:

Institutional investors, asset managers, and advisors must report on how they integrate sustainability risks and adverse impacts at the entity level
Advisors are required to ask about their clients’ ESG preferences and advise appropriate products

While Europe saw a decline in growth from 2018-2020, this is because the region has changed how they define sustainable investing. Tighter legislation means that some products that previously qualified as sustainable may not meet the new requirements. The goal of the legislation is to create clear standards for sustainable products, promoting trust and easier access for investors.

The Mounting Pressure

Globally, the proportion of sustainable investing assets is growing. In fact, sustainable investments make up 36% of global assets under management, up from 28% in 2016.

Investment professionals say the top drivers of sustainable investing are to help manage investment risks, and because clients demand it. Not only that, the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has reinforced the importance of sustainable investments.

“The climate crisis poses enormous financial risk to investment managers, asset owners and businesses….. The public and private sector must work together to ensure a just and rapid transformation to a net-zero global economy.”
—António Guterres, UN Secretary-General

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