As home prices reach new highs across the U.S., female buyers are feeling the sting of limited affordability heightened by a longstanding gender pay gap. Though pay equity is becoming slightly more common in some professional fields, women working in finance, education, and health services are still seeing the largest income disparities, a financial hurdle which is now spilling over into the housing market, Zillow reports.
Due to current home prices and income disparities across industries, female buyers have 18 percentage points fewer homes available to them than their male counterparts, and in all 13 job categories analyzed nationally by Zillow, men can afford a larger share of housing stock than women.
In some industries and markets the disparities are considerably larger, including the financial industry. In Denver, for example, women working in the financial services industry can reasonably afford fewer than one in five (19.3%) of homes in the area, while men can expect to reasonably be able to afford more than two-thirds (70.6%). The situation is similar in Portland, where two-thirds of men in the financial services industry can afford a typical home, compared to only 13.9% of women.