You’ve probably heard that Millennials are doing better than previous generations in saving for retirement—those who landed jobs, anyway. But here’s something you may not have heard so much about: young men are saving significantly more than young women.
That’s the finding from a new Wells Fargo survey on Millennial savings habits, which found that overall 55% of young adults are saving for retirement. But that number disguises a wide gender gap. More than 60% of men are stashing money away, compared with just 50% of women.
“We were surprised to see the gap in this generation, when they have such similar profiles,” said Karen Wimbish, director of retail retirement at Wells Fargo. She points to the relatively few number of women in high-paying positions as a key reason for the disparity. For college-educated Millennial men, the median household income is $77,000, according to the survey; for women, it’s $63,000. (Those figures are similar to 2012 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which found that women ages 20 to 24 earn just 89% the median earnings of their male counterparts.)
Given that difference in pay, it’s not that surprising that 26% of young men manage to save more than 10% of their incomes, compared with just 9% of women. The majority of women surveyed (53%) put away only 1% to 5% of their pay.
For both men and women, debt loads are making it more difficult to save. Some 40% of Millennials say they feel overwhelmed by debt. Nearly half say more than 50% of their pay is going toward debt repayment, and 56% “live from paycheck to paycheck,” the survey reported. The largest payments were owed to credit cards (16% of debt), followed by mortgages (15%), student loans (12%), auto loans (9%), and medical bills (5%).
Still, paying off debt, especially high-interest credit-card balances, can be a smart move, even if it delays saving, says Dan Weeks, a financial planner at Sound Stewardship in Overland Park, Kansas. But for many Millennials, those payments are likely to slow their ability to buy a house and start a family.
One bright spot: Millennials are becoming less risk averse—nearly one-third are invested in the stock market. Among college-educated young men, median financial assets, including stocks and bonds, were $58,500; for women, $31,400. And more than two-thirds of Millennial expect their life after retirement to be better than that of their parents. They could be right about that.