Buying a Home: Why Single Women Do It More Than Men

Is buying a home genetically programmed? According to the National Association of Realtors, almost twice as many single women (20 percent) are buying homes than single men (12 percent). Why would that be?

Well, Century 21 thinks the reason is because women are outperforming men in the job market. According to the New York Times, as of January 2010, women outnumbered men on the payrolls of American companies. (I do love what Casey Mulligan, an economy professor at University of Chicago and a man, had to say about that: "Important milestones remain to be achieved...." Milestones like... 75 percent of the workforce? 90 percent? 100 percent?)

And the same Times story mentions why this triumph of women happened in 2010: The recession has impacted men far more than women. "Since the recession began in December 2007," it reads, "men have lost 7.4 million jobs on net, whereas women have lost 3.9 million jobs. In other words, both sexes are worse off than they were before the downturn, but men have suffered more."

Apparently, the tale is far worse that anyone imagined, however, if The Hamilton Project of the Brookings Institute is to be believed: The median wage has been stagnant since 1969, or so people thought, but it turns out, if you look at only the median wage of men, it's down 23 percent or $13,000 in real dollars since 1969.