(NEW YORK) — Zola, the online wedding planning and registry site, was hacked over the weekend, the company said in a statement Monday evening.
“Over the weekend, our site & apps came under a cybersecurity attack known as credential stuffing,” the statement read.
Credential stuffing, the company said, is a kind of cyberattack in which hackers “take advantage of people who use the same email and passwords on multiple websites,” using stolen login information to submit widescale login attempts in several different places.
Less than 0.1% of accounts were impacted in the breach, according to Zola.
Bank and credit card information was not exposed in the hack, and officials said the company immediately corrected the problem.
Users first began flagging irregularities with their Zola accounts over the weekend. Some couples said they had money stolen out of their honeymoon registries before they were able to transfer it over to their bank accounts.
Ariel Carpenter, a Louisville, Kentucky doctor, said she was one of those impacted by the hack, describing the experience as a “rollercoaster.”
“It just feels very violating because planning a wedding is a very personal enterprise. At the end of the day, you’re planning a party for your closest family and friends,” said Carpenter, who is slated to get married at the end of June. “And so my initial thought, unfortunately, was that whoever hacked us had access to our family and friends’ contact information.”
Carpenter said she had lost $350 from her honeymoon account on the website, but had not yet received a refund.
Zola said no guest information was compromised in the cyberattack.
The company also stated that it had blocked all attempted unauthorized cash transfers and would restore all funds to couples’ accounts as soon as possible.
“Couples who did experience irregular activity on their accounts can rest assured that any outstanding issues will be resolved and addressed,” Zola said Monday, stating that it would be reaching out to couples “proactively.”
Experts recommend against recycling passwords across different sites as it leaves users vulnerable to cyberattacks like the one this past weekend. Some have suggested using a combination of three random words to create stronger passwords, as the letter combinations make them much more difficult for hacking software to crack.
Tech experts also recommend wiping your phone completely and resetting it to factory defaults before getting rid of it, as hackers may be able to request a password reset on various accounts and apps otherwise.
(NEW YORK) — Everyone deserves a shoe that’s functional, fashionable and inclusive. Reebok’s latest release embodies all three.
The athletic brand has partnered with online shoe retailer Zappos to release brand new adaptive shoes for individuals with disabilities.
In an Instagram post introducing the line, the company shared that the goal of its latest Fit to Fit collection was to provide functional products that don’t compromise style or performance.
“Each model within the collection offers enhanced features to help anybody with any body gain more independence in whatever they do,” the company wrote.
The collection includes the Club MEMT Parafit, a stylish pick that works for everyday wear. The shoe has a medial zip closure, a wider low-cut design for easy mobility and a removable sockliner.
There’s also the Nanoflex Parafit TR, which has a lightweight mesh upper, medial zip closure and a heel pull tab, making it easier to slip on.
Both shoes are available in a variety of colorways and a wide range of sizes.
In addition to the launch of the new Fit to Fit collection, Reebok and Zappos are also donating 750 pairs of adult shoes to athletes participating in the 2022 Special Olympic USA Games, which will be held June 5-12, to ensure they have what they need to succeed.
(NEW YORK) — The highest court in Massachusetts ruled Tuesday the state attorney general can pursue a civil lawsuit that accused Exxon Mobil of misleading investors about its products and their impact on the climate.
The unanimous opinion, written by Associate Justice Scott Kafker, rejected Exxon Mobil’s attempt to dismiss the lawsuit on grounds it violated a state law that protects the company from lawsuits meant to silence Exxon Mobil’s public advocacy on energy policy.
The opinion said the so-called anti-SLAPP law in Massachusetts does not apply to the attorney general.
“Importantly, she is entrusted with the enforcement of the Commonwealth’s laws, in large part through bringing civil enforcement proceedings,” Kafker said. “Construing the anti-SLAPP statute to apply to the Attorney General would place significant roadblocks to the enforcement of the Commonwealth’s laws.”
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey accused Exxon Mobil in a 2019 lawsuit of failing to disclose to investors material facts about climate change and misleading consumers about the harm Exxon Mobil’s products cause to the environment.
“Exxon Mobil is misleading Massachusetts consumers through so-called “greenwashing” campaigns that wrongly imply that Exxon Mobil is taking steps to solve climate change and reduce carbon,” according to court records.
Exxon Mobil has denied wrongdoing. It cast the lawsuit as political and an unlawful attempt by the attorney general to quash energy policies with which she disagrees.
“The First Amendment reflects the principle that when the government objects to speech, ‘the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence,’” Exxon Mobil said.
Healey, who is now running for governor, lauded the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling.
“Once again, Exxon’s attacks on my office and our case have been rejected by the courts. Today’s ruling is a resounding victory in our work to stop Exxon from lying to investors and consumers in our state,” she said.
(NEW YORK) — New Coke bottles have started appearing in the U.K. as the popular soda brand continues on its path toward more sustainable packaging.
“As part of Coca-Cola’s journey towards a World Without Waste, we are transitioning to a new packaging system in Great Britain and other European markets,” a representative for the brand told “Good Morning America.” “The new packaging ensures the cap remains attached to the bottle — making it easier than ever for consumers to recycle the whole package, ensuring that no cap gets left behind.”
The attached caps debuted on select 1.5-liter bottles in the U.K., with more pack sizes to be introduced throughout the year.
The fresh design comes on the heels of a new regulation from the European Union intended to reduce waste and pollution. The regulation, which goes into effect in July 2024, states that caps on some non-returnable bottles holding up to three liters must have a cap that is firmly attached to the container.
According to The Coca-Cola Co., this new design is the result of “extensive research with our suppliers and consumer testing.”
The new cap allows someone drinking a Coke to retain the lid with the bottle, which ultimately prevents the cap from being littered, and offers “a positive drinking experience.”
All of the new caps remain 100% recyclable, along with the bottles, which have been 100% recyclable for several years.
In 2018, The Coca-Cola Co. announced its World Without Waste program to “reduce our global use of virgin plastic by 20% (the cumulative equivalent of 3 million metric tons) by 2025.” The company also pledged to “use at least 50% recycled material in our packaging by 2030.”
There are currently no immediate plans to bring the new attached-cap innovation to the U.S., a representative for the brand confirmed to “GMA.”
“By the end of 2024, we aim to have transitioned our entire production to attached caps as we progress to more sustainable packaging,” the company stated.
(NEW YORK) — Lately, the stock market has taken a thrashing.
The Nasdaq and S&P 500 have each fallen for seven consecutive weeks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has fared even worse, dropping for eight weeks straight, the longest such losing streak for the index since the early years of the Great Depression, in 1932.
The losses on Wall Street owe in no small part to the wider economy’s most pressing problem: sky-high inflation, Edward Moya, a senior market analyst at broker OANDA, told ABC News. For months, strong consumer spending and snarled supply chains have sent prices soaring for everyday expenses like food and gas, as well as for materials like computer chips that many US companies rely upon.
In response, the Federal Reserve has raised its benchmark interest rate to a range of 0.75% to 1%, and the central bank has signaled a series of additional hikes.
The goal is to slow down the economy, which in theory should eat away at demand and slash inflation. But the approach all but ensures a downturn for stocks, and runs the risk of hitting the brakes on the economy so hard that it triggers a wider contraction.
“The stock market is down — I’m not surprised, that’s by design,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s, told ABC News.
But the rate hikes at the Fed could send the economy into a downturn, especially if an unexpected headwind puts further strain on the economy, Zandi said.
“The risks of this going off the rails are pretty high,” he said. “So we’re vulnerable.”
As the market and economy teeter, buzzwords like “correction,” “bear market” and even “recession” are coming back into the conversation, conjuring images of layoffs, foreclosures and bankruptcies.
But the definitions and implications of these terms can get lost in the tumult, stoking outsized panic in some cases and insufficient caution in others.
What is a bear market?
The S&P 500 made headlines last Friday when it briefly entered bear market territory, which generally means a 20% drop since the index’s most recent high over at least a two-month period. On Friday afternoon, the index had fallen 1.9% for the day, crossing the threshold for a bear market. But it rallied to end the trading day up 0.01% point, elevating it just barely outside of bear market territory. As of market close on Monday, it had ticked up even further.
For its part, the tech-heavy Nasdaq entered a bear market on March 7, and as of market close on Monday had fallen more than 30% since a record high in November.
The prospect of a bear market, and the pessimistic investment environment that it entails, carry disconcerting near-term implications. In the 26 bear markets since 1929, the S&P 500 — the index that most people’s 401(k)’s track — has lost an average of 35.6% of its value over a typical duration of 289 days or about 9 ½ months, according to a report from Hartford Funds.
In comparison with a bear market, a correction entails a milder stock market decline, amounting to a drop of 10% to 20% from the most recent high. The S&P 500 has been in correction territory since late February.
For some traders who jumped into the market during its pandemic boom — when the S&P 500 rose some 108% from March 2020 to its peak in early January — the current downturn may be their first. But a bear market is an expected part of the stock market cycle, especially in light of the pandemic stimulus that flooded the economy in the form of direct payments, low interest rates and other measures, Moya, the senior market analyst, told ABC News.
“We’ve seen a historic amount of support help stabilize the economy,” Moya said. “Also, what that did was inflate risky assets, which included the stock market.”
The currently depressed stock prices should appeal to patient traders, Moya added.
“If you’re a long-term investor, and you believe in the US. economy and that the froth is being taken out of the market,” he said. “These levels should be attractive.”
What is a recession?
The unrelenting market decline has raised fears of a recession.
Many observers define a recession through the shorthand metric of two consecutive quarters of decline in a nation’s inflation-adjusted gross domestic product, or GDP. A country’s GDP is the total value of goods and services that it produces.
U.S. GDP shrank at an annual rate of 1.4% over the first three months of this year, the worst quarterly performance since the recession brought about by the coronavirus in 2020. If the GDP contracts over the second quarter of the year, that would qualify the downturn as a recession in many people’s eyes.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, or NBER, a research organization seen as an authority on measuring economic performance, uses a more complicated definition that takes into account several indicators that must convey “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months,” the group says. This definition determines whether a downturn is formally designated as a recession, since the NBER is the official arbiter on the subject.
A report released last year by the NBER showed that the pandemic-induced recession of 2020 lasted only two months. By comparison, the organization said that the Great Recession spanned from December 2007 to June 2009, lasting 18 months.
“The R-word is something that triggers a lot of fear and panic for your average American because normally it suggests the job market is taking a turn for the worse and that consumer spending will weaken significantly,” Moya, the senior market analyst, said.
Zandi, the chief economist, put the odds of a recession over the next 12 months at 1 in 3. But he downplayed the severity of a potential recession, noting that he doesn’t see any “major imbalances” in the economy.
“It’s likely to be short and mild,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a reason to run for the bunkers but it’s a reason to be cautious.”
(NEW YORK) — A baby formula shortage has escalated in recent months from a product recall to a national crisis, prompting emergency responses from business leaders and White House officials.
As of early May, 43% of U.S. baby formula was out of stock, according to the data firm Datasembly.
To help make up for the shortfall, the Biden administration on Sunday began flying in tens of thousands of pounds of baby formula from abroad in what it calls “Operation Fly Formula.” A day before, an apology in a Washington Post op-ed was issued by Robert Ford, the CEO of Abbott Nutrition, the nation’s largest baby formula producer.
The emergency has come on the heels of the voluntary shutdown in February of an Abbott factory in Sturgis, Michigan, where the company produces major brands of powdered formula like Similac and EleCare. The shutdown went into effect when four babies fell sick from bacterial disease after ingesting formula produced at the facility and two of the infants died. It remains unclear whether the bacteria that made the children ill came from the baby formula produced at the Michigan factory, but a Food and Drug Administration inspection of the facility found it fell short of adequate sanitation.
The root causes of the desperate situation stretch well beyond the last few months, supply chain experts told ABC News. Pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions led to barren store shelves, rigid international trade barriers impeded imports and market concentration left few alternate suppliers, they said.
“The scenario where you have a manufacturing problem that occurred at an Abbott facility in Michigan, those kinds of things happen all the time,” Nada Sanders, a professor of supply chain management at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business, told ABC News. “Ultimately, we have very, very weak supply chains.”
Many families rely on baby formula for some portion of sustenance early in a child’s life. Almost 20% of babies consume infant formula before they reach two days of age, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a 2020 report. More than half of infants receive supplementary nutrition in addition to breastfeeding over their first three months, the report said. Some babies require formula to meet specific nutritional needs.
As with a host of products — from computer chips to lumber — the pandemic has snarled the supply chain for baby formula. Shortages of labor and raw materials have slowed production and hampered distribution, Sanders said. The disruption weakens the supply chain’s responsiveness to the sudden ups and downs of customer demand, she added.
“All of this is ultimately related to the COVID pandemic, and really two-and-a-half years of supply chain disruptions and backlogs of every kind possible,” Sanders said.
Even amid the widespread supply chain disruptions brought about by the coronavirus, few products have faced the crisis-level shortages observed with baby formula in recent weeks, said Sanders and Scott Lincicome, an economist at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute.
One reason why the baby formula market has proven especially susceptible to shortages is the trade barriers and public health regulations that prevent major inflow of the products from abroad, Lincicome said. The U.S. imposes steep tariffs on baby formula. Plus, the FDA requires foreign manufacturers to abide by nutritional and labeling requirements.
In turn, 98% of baby formula consumed in the U.S. is produced domestically. When the Abbott factory shut down, the market lacked an international supply to fill the gap. Last week, the FDA announced “increased flexibilities” for the importation of baby formula in an effort to alleviate the shortage.
But the supply problems aren’t confined to overseas producers, Sanders and Lincicome said. They pointed to a key problem that hinders the responsiveness of the domestic baby formula industry: business concentration. Abbott, the top producer, accounts for about 48% of the U.S. formula market. In all, four companies — Abbott, Nestle USA, Perrigo and Mead Johnson Nutrition — control roughly 90% of the market.
Some critics, including Lincicome, have attributed the small number of market players largely to a federal nutrition program for women, infants and children, known as WIC, which helps low-income families purchase baby formula. Roughly half of the baby formula bought in the U.S. goes through WIC, with about 1.2 million infants getting ahold of formula through the program. That scale grants WIC considerable power in the marketplace, Lincicome said.
WIC uses a system in which each state chooses a single company to be the sole provider of baby formula for all residents enrolled in the program. That approach reduces the price that WIC pays for baby formula, cutting the cost for taxpayers, Lincicome said. But the large size of each statewide contract prevents small companies from winning a bid and gaining a foothold, he added.
In response to the crisis, President Joe Biden signed a measure on Saturday that allows families enrolled in WIC to buy formula beyond what the program normally allows in emergency situations.
“Combine the trade wall with domestic concentration,” Lincicome said. “You have a situation where you end up having a few players in a closed market and when one of those players goes down, the other handful of players left can’t fill the gaps.”
He added: “And you lack access to global markets which might be able to fill that gap in the short term.”
Last week, Abbott and the FDA reached an agreement for the company to reopen the Michigan factory, which should eventually return U.S. baby formula supply back to normal, Sanders said. She predicted it would take three months to fully alleviate the shortage; Lincicome estimated eight weeks.
“Hopefully Abbott will be able to get their production out and get everything smoothly running and what’s taken by customers is replenished at the right cadence,” Sanders said. “Meaning no bumps.”
(WASHINGTON) — Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine has sued Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly failing to protect consumer data following the Cambridge Analytica data leak.
“The evidence shows Mr. Zuckerberg was personally involved in Facebook’s failure to protect the privacy and data of its users leading directly to the Cambridge Analytica incident,” Racine said in a statement about the lawsuit released Monday. “This unprecedented security breach exposed tens of millions of Americans’ personal information, and Mr. Zuckerberg’s policies enabled a multi-year effort to mislead users about the extent of Facebook’s wrongful conduct.”
He added, “This lawsuit is not only warranted, but necessary, and sends a message that corporate leaders, including CEOs, will be held accountable for their actions.”
The lawsuit alleges that Zuckerberg was “responsible for” and “had the clear ability” to control Facebook operations and enabled Cambridge Analytica to use consumer data. The lawsuit alleges that third-party firms like Cambridge Analytica got data from 87 million Americans and half of District of Columbia residents.
Racine filed a lawsuit against Facebook in December 2018 for the data leak and is bringing this suit following evidence found during that litigation, according to the attorney general.
Facebook has faced previous government scrutiny over the data leak to Cambridge Analytica. In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion over the incident, and required the company to abide by new restrictions aimed at instituting greater accountability in decisions that affect user privacy.
The Cambridge Analytica leak, which several news outlets reported in 2018, concerned the London-based firm gaining access to user data in 2015 and using it to aid the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
Cambridge Analytica filed for bankruptcy and began insolvency proceedings in the U.S. not long after the scandal broke.
(NEW YORK) — The head of one of the country’s largest manufacturers of baby formula expressed remorse at his company’s role in the nationwide shortage — and announced a multimillion-dollar fund to help families that have suffered during the crisis — in an op-ed published over the weekend.
“The past few months have distressed us as they have you, and so I want to say: We’re sorry to every family we’ve let down since our voluntary recall exacerbated our nation’s baby formula shortage,” Abbott CEO Robert Ford wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “I have high expectations of this company, and we fell short of them.”
Abbott recalled formula and closed its manufacturing plant in Sturgis, Michigan, in February over concerns about bacterial contamination after four infants fell ill. That compounded coronavirus-related supply chain issues already fueling a baby formula shortage.
Ford reiterated a two-week timeline for when Abbott’s shuttered Sturgis plant will reopen — saying he expects the company will be able to restart the facility “by the first week in June.”
Once that facility is back at full capacity, Ford said that Abbott plans to “more than double” its current domestic production.
“By the end of June, we will be supplying more formula to Americans than we were in January before the recall,” Ford wrote, adding that Abbott will be “making significant investments to ensure this never happens again.”
Once the plant restarts production, it will take six to eight weeks before product is available on shelves, according to Ford.
Abbott’s specialized formula, EleCare, was included in its recall, leaving families with limited nutrition options particularly scrambling to find formula. There have been reports of several children hospitalized due to the lack of EleCare.
In his op-ed, Ford said the company will “invest in upgrading our safety and quality processes and equipment” and “create the redundancy we need to never have to stop production of critical products” like the specialized formulas for children who can’t digest other formulas and milks.
Ford called the hospitalizations due to a lack of EleCare “tragic and heartbreaking” and added that Abbott is “working to identify ways” to get sick kids across the country what they need.
Once manufacturing resumes, Abbott will “prioritize EleCare … and get that out the door first,” Ford wrote.
As the company further works to help ease the shortage, Abbott’s Ohio plant’s lines have also been converted from adult nutrition products to make more ready-to-feed infant formula, and the company is airfreighting in more powdered formula from its Ireland facility, Ford noted.
While families wait for formula to hit shelves, Ford announced in his op-ed that Abbott is establishing a $5 million fund “to help these families with medical and living expenses as they weather this storm.”
“These steps we’re taking won’t end the struggles of families today,” Ford wrote. “Some solutions will take weeks, others will take longer, but we will not rest until it is done. I will not rest. I want everyone to trust us to do what is right, and I know that must be earned back.”
In response to the crisis, this week President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to get ingredients to manufacturers to help speed up production. He also directed Department of Defense commercial aircraft to pick up infant formula overseas to get on U.S. shelves faster while U.S. manufacturers ramp up production.
The first batch of imported baby formula arrived Sunday in the United States.
The shipment includes hypoallergenic formulas for children with cow’s milk protein allergies.
(NEW YORK) — In the coming weeks, thousands of graduates will walk across a stage to receive their college diploma.
When they leave the stage, they will have not only a degree but also, in most cases, a mountain of bills, joining the more than 40 million Americans who owe a collective $1.76 trillion in student debt, according to the Education Data Initiative, a nonprofit organization.
Corazon Eaton of Columbus, Ohio, is among that group. The 35-year-old graduated with a master’s degree in public health in 2014, earning a diploma that cost her more than $100,000 in student loans.
“The only thing that I was really taught as an immigrant in the United States is the importance of an education and that I needed to obtain that in order to further and advance my professional and personal life,” Eaton, who was born in Kenya, told Good Morning America. “And so, that’s what I did.”
Over the next decade, Eaton said interest on her loans grew, eventually accruing $30,000 on top of what she owed at graduation.
“Thinking through the long-term impact of this was not something that I was aware of when I took out all these student loans,” she said. “Maybe I would have done things differently.”
In less than two decades, student debt in the United States has increased by 144%, growing from just over $640 billion in 2007 to more than $1.5 trillion today, according to a report released last year by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
The rise, experts say, is attributable to many factors, including policy decisions that made student loans both easier to obtain and harder to pay back, economic recessions and the shift in payment burden to families.
Another factor is the rising cost of college — a 103% increase over the past three decades — compared to a much slower increase in household income, which increased by only 14% in that same time period, according to the American Association of University Women, a nonprofit focused on advancing gender equity.
“We have seen a shift in who is paying for college,” Fenaba R. Addo, associate professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who studies student debt and wealth inequality, told GMA. “That burden has shifted to families who are facing stagnant wages and income over time, and loans became the solution.”
Student debt burden falls on women from the start
The bulk of student loan debt in the U.S. has fallen on women, who today hold nearly two-thirds of all outstanding student debt, an amount that totals more than $900 billion, according to the American Association of University Women.
More female undergraduates take on student loans upon entering college than men. Upon graduation, a female graduate owes, on average, nearly $22,000 in debt, while a male graduate owes, on average, around $18,000, the group found.
“It is a significant burden on women when it comes to the ways in which it impacts every aspect of their careers and their lives moving forward,” Gloria Blackwell, the group’s CEO, told GMA.
One reason for the divide is that, on top of taking out more student loans, women outpace men when it comes to earning both their four-year college degrees and their graduate degrees, according to the Pew Research Center and the National Center for Education Statistics.
“If you take on a student loan for your bachelor’s degree, and you take on a student loan for your graduate degree, the compilation of those two is going to put you in a space where you’re going to owe more,” said Nicole Smith, research professor and chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “So women are disproportionately holders of more education and therefore more likely to hold higher amounts of debt associated with having achieved that.”
Experts also pointed to for-profit colleges as a cause of rising student debt for women, who make up 63% of the for-profit student population, according to the Center for Analysis of Postsecondary Education and Employment.
For-profit colleges are designed with flexibility in mind, and also have higher fees and tuition than both community colleges and public universities, according to the organization.
“The way that they’re modeled, the flexibility in being able to work and also go to school, has overwhelmingly attracted women, especially Black women who did not complete their degrees the first time or did not go straight from high school or are looking to change careers,” Addo said. “They’re a vehicle for women not only to return to college and get their degrees, but also to do so at a high cost.”
Women are also more impacted by student debt if they have children, as they may borrow more to ease the burden of other household costs, such as child care. Women with children may also lack the ability to work while attending school, and having a child may also extend the length of time they’re in college, Blackwell said.
A disproportionate burden on Black women
Black women are the most likely of any gender group to have student loans. According to the Census Bureau, around 1 in 4 Black women report having some student debt.
Black women graduate with an average of $37,558 in student debt, according to research by the American Association of University Women research.
“Black women take on more debt than anyone, and so they graduate with more student loan debt than any other category,” Blackwell said. “That’s a combination of racism and sexism and those intersecting pieces that put a disproportionate burden on Black women.”
As Black women and other minority women enter college, they often are forced to take on more student loans due to what Blackwell calls the racial wealth gap. They are also more often to be first-generation college students, which may mean having less knowledge of the financial aid system than their peers.
“Knowing that the typical white family has at least eight times the wealth of a Black family and five times that of a Latino family, it really shows that the student debt crisis is really about the racial wealth gap,” said Blackwell. “They have less support from their families. There is no generational wealth that is there to pick up whatever the gap is.”
Kristin McGuire, 40, who is Black, said she had to borrow more than $20,000 to attend a four-year public college in California. In the years since, she said her debt was compounded by forbearance programs that increased the amount of money she would have to repay to over $50,000.
“After college, I was not completely sure how to go into repayment,” McGuire told GMA. “I think one of the larger problems with our student debt system is we allow 18-year-olds to take out these loans and not really have a clear understanding on how to repay them.”
Systemic barriers to paying off debt
While women graduate, on average, with around $4,000 more in student loan debt than men, the burden for women grows dramatically in the years after college, as they try to repay it, experts say.
According to the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), a policy-focused organization focused on gender justice, women across all races are also paid approximately 83 cents to every dollar paid to men across the same groups. With less income, they are unable to pay as much debt off each month, which leads to higher interest and increased debt.
For women of color, the pay gap is even worse, with Black women earning 64 cents on the dollar, and Latinas earning just 57 cents. Among Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women, the gap varies according to group, with some making as little as 52 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.
That loss of pay adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a career, the National Women’s Law Center said.
As women, particularly Black women, make less money in their careers, they have less money to pay back their student loans, a confluence Smith described as a “perfect storm.”
“They make less money. They need to borrow more. They struggle significantly with repayment. You have the gender wage gap,” Smith told GMA. “You really have a perfect storm where the experience of Black women with student loans is that they, at the end of the day, end up with the highest proportion of student loan debt, eight years after, 10 years after graduation.”
In addition to the gender pay gap, many women are also impacted by the caregiving gap, often taking lesser-paying jobs that allow flexibility to care for children or other family members. On average, women who are mothers make 70 cents for every dollar paid to fathers, according to the American Association of University Women.
Smith said women are also disproportionately in careers that require high levels of education, like teaching and nursing, but that are not high-paying, making loan repayment even more tricky.
When women spend decades of their lives paying off loans, they are less likely to be able to save for retirement and less likely to have a stake in things like home ownership, car ownership and investments, according to Blackwell.
For McGuire, the student loan debt that has followed her throughout her adult life has meant that she and her husband had to delay purchasing their first home and haven’t been able to fully contribute to their savings for themselves and their two children.
“[…] Not contributing to 401(k)s because we’re trying to pay off student debt. These are the things that will impact us later on that maybe we’re not seeing right now,” McGuire said. “That $500 a month payment for my student loan could have been something that would help me prepare for myself in older age, as well as my husband and as well as all Americans who are making these decisions.”
The burden of student loans may also impact more personal choices for women, like where they live, whether they can expand their family and whether or not they stay in a marriage.
Marquita Prinzing, of Renton, Washington, still owes around $100,000 in student loans more than a decade after finishing her master’s degree in education. She said it was only during the past two years of the coronavirus pandemic — during which student loan repayments were paused — that she was able to leave her marriage and buy her first home on her own.
Still, Prinzing, a 38-year-old mother of two, said she continues to feel the weight of her student loans as Aug. 31, the date federal student loan payments are set to restart, approaches.
Having to once again deal with the loan payments then “means I can’t really think of a different or bigger future,” she told GMA in April, when President Joe Biden extended the repayment pause.
Women feel squeezed amid student debt debate
Over the past two years of the pandemic, Perla Ortiz of Fabens, Texas, saw her college career upended, even as her student loans loomed.
In the spring of 2021, Ortiz, a first-generation college student, lost her work-study job on campus at St. Edward’s University in Austin when classes switched to a virtual format. She then moved back home and had to take a break from school to work and save money.
Though she is not currently attending school and does not yet have her college diploma, Ortiz will owe tens of thousands of dollars when student loan repayments resume in August.
“Sometimes, because of my financial situation, it’s hard to go to sleep with peace of mind knowing that when I wake up, I’m going to have to work really hard in order to pay that money back,” she said.
Biden pledged to approve $10,000 in student loan forgiveness for every federal borrower during his presidential campaign, but he has yet to do so, and has expanded parts of existing loan forgiveness programs instead.
In the meantime, as borrowers wait to see what, if anything, will happen before the repayment pause ends in August, women’s advocates are calling for broader changes to what they describe as systemic inequalities that negatively impact women.
“We have been pushing for quite a long time to pass legislation around eliminating the pay gap, like the Paycheck Fairness Act, and closing some of the loopholes that exist and are why the pay gap issues are perpetuated,” Blackwell said. “If you’re not going to push forward with loan forgiveness, at least give women an opportunity to really step into their full earning path.”
For Eaton, it was not until she got a new job last year that nearly doubled her income that she said she was able to make a significant dent in her student loans. With repayments paused, and no accumulating interest, Eaton said she saved more than $130,000 in 14 months and paid off her remaining loan balance.
“The average person spends 20 years of their life paying their student loan debt, and I just didn’t want to be imprisoned with that,” she said. “So it felt such a relief to be able to do it.”
