Meet America’s real Golden Girls: Some unmarried older women without kids at home are doing great

Ruth Schick, 85, considers traveling in retirement her third career.

She began her solo travel in earnest in 2000 after her husband died. She’s been to every continent and every state in the US. Her favorite domestic expedition was retracing Lewis and Clark’s route. She’s been to Antarctica twice.

“Any number of people have said, ‘well, why would you want to go there?’ But my only piece of advice is, whether it’s travel or something else, don’t fritter away your life,” she said. Before retirement, she worked as a community college counselor and in historical research.

Ruth Schick in the Arctic in 2022.

Schick is one member of a group that’s doing surprisingly well in the US: women who aren’t married and don’t have any of their own kids under 18 at home. Those women tend to be older, and any children they may have had are now adults.

Based on a new analysis of 2022 data from the Pew Research Center, this group’s median wealth has surpassed that of unmarried men, with or without kids. Their wealth benefited from rising home values, savings, and no husband or young children. As the US approaches a peak in boomer retirements and birth rates decline, their ranks will likely grow.

The chart above shows the median wealth of US households by marital status and the presence or absence of children under 18. In 2022, unmarried women without kids had a median household wealth of $87,200, while unmarried men had a typical net worth of $82,100. Women classified as unmarried were either divorced, widowed, partnered, or have never tied the knot. Pew could not divide unmarried men by parental status because the group with children living with them was so small.

Big nest eggs, empty nests

So why are unmarried women without kids doing better than their unmarried male counterparts? It’s all about age, said Richard Fry, a senior researcher at Pew and the author of the analysis.

The former group is 61, on the median, part of the baby boomer generation. Baby boomers, ages 60 to 78, have had the time and good market fortune to accrue valuable assets through big stock and real estate booms in recent decades.

Unmarried men tend to be younger; they’re 50-year-old Gen Xers on the median. Plus, men don’t live as long as women. As of 2022, women’s life expectancy at birth in the US was 80.2 years old; for men, it was 74.8.

“Your wealth is what you’ve built up, it’s what you’ve accumulated, it’s your nest egg,” Fry said. “And effectively it takes time for people over their working lives to build a nest egg.”

Despite the benefit of time to accrue wealth, Fry said that by some measures, like wages, women are still far behind men.

“But they’re not so far behind in terms of building a nest egg. And wealth is important because you don’t always want to work; someday, you want to retire.” Wealth is an especially important cushion in case of a sudden loss in income or a health emergency. “Wealth is nice to have around because you can maybe tap it to sort of tide you over the bad economic times.”

Older single women were more likely to own their homes and have fewer debts than younger single women, Fry said. Both older single men and women had a median of around $200,000 in home equity. Older single women had around $90,000 in their retirement accounts, compared to $125,000 for older single men.

That’s not to say that married couples are falling behind or wage gaps don’t exist. Men still outearn women and accumulate larger net worths and married Americans are accumulating much more wealth than their single counterparts. But the data does show that these Golden Girls are doing better than one might expect given those facts.

For Patricia Wahlen, 80, a nest egg has meant the ability to travel the world. Wahlen said she didn’t have a passport until she was 46 — she was busy working as a professional fundraiser and parenting two kids. After her husband died when she was 61 — she said he’d only want to visit locations with golf courses — she got the travel bug. She’s been to 85 countries; she liked visiting Scotland, where her father was from, and she hopes to return to Turkey someday.

“I love the travel. I love reading about the places I’m going to go to and arranging the trips and seeing the world. I just feel so lucky. I’ve seen most of the world,” she said.

Wahlen said she signed up early for a pension fund, inherited some stock when her parents died, and lived frugally throughout her career. When her husband died, she didn’t inherit anything from him — instead, she attributed her finances to managing her savings and retirement well.

Beyond her travels, Wahlen is in two book clubs and another social group of seven women.

“I just can’t imagine staying home and doing nothing,” she said. “My friends are all exactly having lives just like mine.”

Women are unhappier than men for most of their lives — until age 85

Many women are still struggling in retirement and living off paltry incomes; women over 65, in particular, are more likely to live in poverty than older men. And many boomers are dealing with their own retirement and savings regrets, such as not saving enough or investing in a nest egg. B-17 has spoken with several women over the age of 65 who have had to “unretire” or take other measures to make ends meet while surviving off Social Security.

Conversely, research finds people’s self-esteem peaks around age 60 and stays high for the next decade, while satisfaction with being single also increases. And other research suggests that while women are unhappier than men for most of their lives, they take the lead on happiness after they hit age 85. On the whole, studies have suggested that single women are happier than their married counterparts.

For some single women over 65, retirement has meant an opportunity to spread their wings. According to internal data provided to B-17 by Road Scholars, an educational nonprofit travel company that caters to the 50+ crowd, just 29% of women over 65 setting out on adventures through the company in 2014 were solo travelers. By 2024, that rose to 37.4%. In total, over 19,000 women over 65 traveled solo in 2024 through the program.

Schick, who worked as a counselor at a community college for decades, said she and her husband never had a huge amount of income coming in. They were both on education salaries; she had a pension that she contributed to for 22 years. But thanks to those savings and her husband’s thoughtful approach to retirement while he was ill, she’s been able to fulfill her travel dreams. Her house and car are paid off, and she’s prioritizing putting her income toward travel.

“I’m making the most of what I have, and I know that that’s the attitude of most people that I know or that I relate to.” She said many of the people she knows in a similar position have the same outlook: “Life isn’t over just because you’re getting older.”