• Women are the "new providers." Women fully accept the provider role – both its nurturing and economic components. Most women fully accept that work and family responsibilities do not detract from one another; they are both essential. Family remains at the core of what’s important for all women, whether they work inside or outside the home.
  
• Women call for a more caring society. In contrast to the harshness and mean-spiritedness they see around them, women believe that people caring about each other is the pivotal first step to solving society’s problems.
  The working women most likely to provide all their households’ incomes are those who are separated, divorced or widowed (64 percent), or who head single-parent households (64 percent). However, even among employed women in married couples, 48 percent provide half or more of the family income.
  
• When asked to say what family values means to them in their own words, nine in ten U.S. women define family values as loving, taking care of and supporting each other (52 percent), or knowing right from wrong and having good values (38 percent).
  
• Women are well suited for the workplace of the future, in terms of their emphasis on the quality of their work and their pursuit of learning. Women will continue to be a valuable resource to the nation’s economy.
  
• Women feel as strongly as ever about the importance of caring family relationships, while many feel just as strongly about the importance of helping to provide economic security to their families.
  
• A quarter of employed women who are married (24 percent) expect their own jobs to provide more financial security for their families over the long term than their partners’ – an increase of 15 percentage points since 1981. In married-couple households, almost two-thirds of women feel that their partners’ jobs offer more financial security than their own jobs; however, this represents a decline of 19 percentage points since 1981.
  
• Nine out of ten women experience time pressures, with nearly three in ten (29 percent) saying that they are "extremely pressed" for time. Women who are employed or who have young children are most likely to feel extremely pressed.
  

Source: "Ask a Working Woman" Survey, conducted by AFL-CIO
The number of working women has grown from 5.3 million in 1900 to 18.4 million in 1950 and to 63 million in 1997.

• In 1997, 12.8 million families were maintained by women, representing 18.2 percent of all families, compared with 5.6 million – 10.8 percent of all families – in 1970.
  
• Nationwide, working families lose $200 billion of income annually to the wage gap.
  
• Over a lifetime of work, the average 25-year-old woman who works full time, year-round until she retires at age 65 will earn $523,000 less than the average working man.
  
• Nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of working women report that they provide about half or more of their household income. More than half (52 percent) of married women contribute about half or more of their household income.
  
• Forty-one percent of working women head their own households – they are single, divorced, separated or widowed – and 28 percent of them have dependent children.
  
• Sixty-two percent of working mothers with children younger than six say that childcare is very important to them. But only 13 percent of these mothers have jobs that provide childcare.
  

Source: Marketing to Women newsletter

• Women spend more time in their cars than the average American spends conversing, playing sports or eating, according to the Surface Transportation Policy Project’s Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey and the Americans’ Use of Time Project.
  
• Women spend an average of 64 minutes a day driving; for married women with children, the average is 66 minutes, and single mothers spend 75 minutes.
  
• More than eight in 10 women describe themselves as stressed out, as compared to seven in 10 men, according to Carolyn Setlow or Roper Starch, writing for Discount Store News.
  
• Over half (51 percent) of single mothers report depressive symptoms, according to the Commonwealth Fund.
  

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