Ginger Rogers—Fred Astaire’s dancing partner—was celebrated as a woman who could “do everything a man does, but do it backwards in high heels.”

Women’s ability to succeed despite their disadvantages has been demonstrated in sports, politics, business, medicine and academics. But when it comes to retiring successfully and comfortably, the obstacles faced by women can be too great to overcome. For many reasons and in a variety of ways, women often do not keep in step with men. In their later years, they often dance alone and not nearly so gracefully or effortlessly as their male counterparts.

In short, women’s later years are not exactly golden.

According to the National Institute on Retirement Security, women age 65 or older are 80% more likely to be below the poverty threshold than men. At ages 75 and older, women’s rate of impoverishment is three times that of men.

What explains this gender wealth gap in later life, and the fact that it gets bigger over time?

It starts in the workplace. Women generally earn less than men over their work lives as a result of spending fewer years working. And while employed, they earn less than men.

There’s also the fact that a woman is likelier to be single in her later years than a man. Census figures indicate that by age 75, the majority of women are single, whereas the majority of similarly aged men have a spouse, even into their 90s.

Longevity and culture can explain this discrepancy. Not only do women have longer life expectancies than men, they also tend to marry partners older than themselves. For a woman in her 50s and 60s, the number of available men in her age group is not only smaller but is more saturated by the presence of younger wives. Finally, women are not as eager as men to remarry after divorce.

But here’s the unanswered question: Does being single in retirement also increase the odds of a woman being poor? Or if not poor in the official government definition of the term, then economically challenged relative to her married sisters?

In the course of writing our book on the issues facing women in their retirement years, we usually begin with our own situations. Both of us are near to or in our 70s. Both of us are single, Marjorie having been widowed and Eleanor having been divorced.

Nevertheless, we enjoy our autonomy as decision makers, no longer having to deal with disagreements about money, restaurants, vacations and sleeping schedules. We are free to come and go as we please.

But we would be the first to admit that autonomy can come at a price. Without partners, routine events such as car breakdowns, home repairs and transportation after medical procedures can all cost money that our non-single friends often don’t have to pay. But that’s just the minor stuff.

Add up the fixed expenses of a home, such as utilities, insurance and maintenance, then divide this sum by “1” rather than “2” and it is clear that the cost of singlehood can loom large when you compare it with that of the partnered life. The financial advantages of shared overhead are simply not there.

There’s also the tendency for singleness to mutate into isolation, which can be as dangerous to health as smoking. Loneliness makes single women more prone to depression and illness, resulting in higher medical costs.

The research backs up our intuitions. The Social Security Administration’s Office of Retirement Policy reports that single, retirement-aged women are poorer than married women. Of those never-married women, 26.1% are poor.

For divorced women retirees, the poverty rate is 18.4%, and for widows it is 16.3%. For married women 65 and older the corresponding poverty rate is 4.9%.

Clearly, marriage goes hand in hand with greater economic security for retired women. Furthermore, having been married at some point in the past is financially better than never having been married. Much of the marriage benefit may come from Social Security spousal and survivor benefits and laws requiring that spouses be named beneficiaries on certain types of retirement plans, unless they proactively waive this right.

Our major purpose in showcasing this data is to turn it into actionable advice for women in their retirement years. However, this does not mean advising women to marry “up” in terms of wealth and “down” in terms of years. Nor do we automatically urge single retiree women to find a roommate or move to cooperative housing as a way of reducing their costs of living.

We believe that you have to tread very carefully with this kind of counsel. Many women, we included, are fierce about their independence in later life. We believe this feistiness can contribute to their ability to financially survive in retirement.

But the one piece of advice we have no hesitation in offering to pre-retiree women is this:

Be aware that your retirement, or a significant portion thereof, may look nothing like ours or his. He may see retirement as a time of leisure, travel, with wife at his side, living in the same fashion and location that they have for years. This is certainly the way the ads for financial services portray it.

By contrast, a single woman’s life often takes a hard turn into a very different scenario. Her life expectancy may take her to the end zones of the age distribution, where household wealth diminishes most rapidly.

Secondly, make sure, particularly if you are now part of a couple, that your retirement planning addresses both the “his” and “her” sides of retirement. Too often couples—even those with financial advisors—stop short, focusing only on the joint retirement vision, without adequately projecting the reality of what may await women in the later phases of their lives. Simply deciding that life insurance may be called for—the amount based on a rule of thumb that she will need 50% of what the couple lived on—doesn’t cut it. A bottom-up, rather than a top-down, analysis of cash flow is needed to ensure that the contingencies of a single lifestyle are planned for.

Women themselves must take responsibility for looking squarely at what may be in store for their later years. We have worked with women who assumed, but did not verify, that they would be OK in retirement, only to find that an insurance policy was canceled, a beneficiary designation was changed, or there was more debt than they realized.

Nowadays we all want our reality to be “virtual,” projected with the added clarity of another dimension so that whatever we are imaging seems immediate, tangible and real. What we argue here, and in our forthcoming book on women in retirement, is that we need to bring more virtual immediacy to the area of retirement planning. We need the gender dimension to bring into focus what our elder years will actually be like. And then, of course, to prepare accordingly, with eyes wide open.        

Eleanor Blayney, MBA, CFP is a retired financial planner, business owner, author and CFP Board consumer advocate. Marjorie Fox, J.D., CFP is a founder and retired CEO of FJY Financial LLC. Together they are writing a book for women in their 60s and 70s, which will be published in 2020.