You know the statement "Women own 60% of US wealth" is just MRA idiocy, right?

[Squinch]

53. So we'll have to use your 2002 numbers so we are both talking about the same thing.

Here is where I am losing you: Are there any figures for how many households fall into each category? We are looking at percentages in each category, but we have no idea of the weight of the relative poverty, and for that we would need to know the numbers of people in each category.

You can't really add up percentages to get the conclusions you have drawn unless you have weighted them by their relative prevalence. For example, if you have two poor women in the first category and 20 in the third, that will give you a very different result than if you have 20 poor women in the first category and 2 in the third.

And do I understand this right? each category excludes the others? or are they three different ways of segmenting the same population.

ETA: If it is three different ways of segmenting the same population, we can extrapolate from those original numbers. But if it is three segments that exclude the others, we can't really know anything about totals.

On the other hand, if it is three different ways of looking at the same population, we can't add up the data anyhow.