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       In many ways, Irene LaMarche has lived a classic American life: college, work, marriage, family, divorce, work, retirement.

But now, at 76, she can't make ends meet.

Some of her early jobs didn't pay into Social Security but instead gave her small lump sums when she left them, and she has no pension coverage from her ex-husband. The Boise, Idaho, resident did get $60,000 from selling her home, and she invested that. All told, she now has a total income of a little over $1,000 a month, and this spring she had to move out of her apartment when the rent jumped to $795. She has found a cheaper place, but even so she needs public assistance to cover the $545 monthly rent.

"I have never lived extravagantly and have scrimped all my life," she told the Senate Committee on Aging recently, and the rent subsidy "is the first help I've ever asked for."

Joan Mackey's story is similar. The Philadelphia woman divorced her abusive husband after 21 years of marriage and, concerned only with her safety and support for her three children, didn't pay much attention to the nuances of the property settlement.

So when her ex-husband became fatally ill a couple of years later, she believed him when he assured her that she would get pension benefits from his employer.

Wrong, said the employer. Because her attorney had not asked for a court order during the divorce proceedings, her husband's former employer said it could not pay.

Mackey now works as a real estate agent and does direct marketing for a dry-cleaning company of which she is part owner, and she is trying to build a retirement nest egg. But "I am now 48 years old, and I am very worried about what I will live on when I can't work anymore," she said.

"I know I am not alone in being very frightened about my future financial security," she added.

Indeed she is not alone. LaMarche, a current retiree, and Mackey, a baby boomer, reflect the situations of a growing number of American women.

Divorce, childbearing and family demands. Bad advice, discrimination, longer lifespans. Those and a host of other factors conspire to place women at much greater risk of financial trouble in retirement than men -- and may consign millions of them to poverty or near-poverty in their old age.

Compared with men, women on average live longer but:

Earn less.

Save less.

Are less likely to have a pension.

"Women's experience growing old in America is very different from men's," said Laurie Young, executive director of the Older Women's League, a nonprofit women's group in Washington. "The financial problems women often face in old age are an extension of the problems and choices they faced earlier in their lives."

Although more women are now in the workforce than ever before -- and they have made considerable progress on pay and other issues -- they still earn less than men in most jobs. On average, according to the Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement, a Washington-based education and advocacy group, women earn 73 cents for every dollar that men earn. And according to calculations by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, a 25-year-old woman with a college degree would typically earn about $523,000 less than a man over her lifetime.

About two-thirds of women working full time earn less than $30,000 a year, said Cindy Hounsell, executive director of the women's institute. And, despite improvements in opportunity and pay, many younger women aren't getting ahead.

For example, younger women are more likely to carry credit card debt than younger men are, she said.

In addition, women's careers tend to be much more erratic than men's, primarily because of childbearing and other family demands.

This pattern often means first quitting work to stay home with young children, and then perhaps quitting again, or working what amounts to two jobs later in life, to care for a parent or other relative.

On average, women spend 12 years out of the workforce for family caregiving over the course of their lives, according to the Older Women's League. And not just for children. Currently, as many as 52 million Americans, mostly women, are "informal caregivers, providing unpaid care and financial support to people with chronic illnesses or disabilities," the group figures.

"Caregiving can be an economic disaster for women and is one of the largest barriers to their retirement security," said Young. "Caregiving shapes women's workforce participation, as they often take more-flexible, lower-wage jobs with few benefits, or stop working altogether in order to provide unpaid caregiving services."

"As a result of caregiving, women lose an average of $550,000 in lifetime wage wealth and about $2,100 annually in already desperately needed Social Security benefits," she said.

The pattern of women's employment has an even harsher effect on pensions than lower earnings do. Traditional pension plans generally employ a formula in calculating benefits that rewards long-tenured, higher-paid workers. Those who are paid less, and especially those who are on the job fewer years, get much lower benefits or none at all.

Some experts have been optimistic that the shift in company pensions in recent years toward 401(k) and similar plans would benefit women. These pensions are usually "portable," meaning that they can be transferred to a new employer or rolled over into an individual retirement account so that there is less of a penalty for changing jobs.

But a new study by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, funded in part by the Labor Department, found that things may not work out that way. In practice, workers who leave a job are allowed, or sometimeseven required, to take the money from their 401(k) or similar retirement plan in a lump sum.

When such distributions are made, it appears that women, in part because of the financial pressure they are under, are more likely to spend the money than to roll it over into an IRA or transfer it to a plan at their new employer.

"Both men and women spend their lump-sum payments at an alarming rate. Women's slightly greater propensity to use pension payments for everyday expenses" -- 23.3 percent who received a lump-sum distribution vs. 20.9 percent of men -- suggests the trend toward 401(k) and similar plans could create special problems for women, the study said.

A further problem in private pensions and benefits arises when women depend on their husbands. Over the years, laws have been changed to prevent men from opting for a pension annuity that is higher but ends at his death, leaving his widow with nothing. Today, the wife has to agree in writing to such a choice.

All of those facts -- women as childbearers, women as caregivers, women in and out of the workforce -- would be rendered harmless were it not for another fact of modern American life: divorce. If the childbearer and caregiver has a husband who works steadily throughout the years, earning the maximum Social Security benefits, qualifying for a pension, and/or contributing to a 401(k) plan or IRA, she can face retirement at his side, well provided for. But so often that's not the case.

In divorces, as Mackey found, employer-sponsored pensions and insurance are property to be divided up between the spouses. While wives have claims on these assets, they often undervalue them when compared with more visible (and more immediately needed) assets such as the house. As a result, they often don't fight for the pension or insurance rights.

John Hotz of the Pension Rights Center in Washington warned women not to give up their claim to the husband's pension without proper compensation. The pension could be worth thousands and thousands of dollars over their retired lifetimes.

Mackey said her husband's pension would have been worth $150 to $200 a month -- not a large sum, but month after month, year after year, a welcome supplement to Social Security and her own savings.

In addition to the male-female gap in private pensions, the Social Security system doesn't always work in women's favor.

LaMarche, for example, held several public-school teaching jobs that were exempt from the Social Security system at the time, so she earned no credits for those years. Instead, she got a lump sum from the schools' plan when she left -- which she spent because she needed the money.

And married women who do work and pay their Social Security taxes often find that they are required to choose between their husband's benefits and their own. Because their husband's benefits are typically larger, the women take them -- but then they get nothing for all the taxes they have paid into the system. Like many of the "marriage penalties" that now plague working women under the income tax law, these rules were written at a time when most married women did not work outside the home and were intended to protect, not hurt, them.

But today "6 of every 10 women pay a huge amount of Social Security taxes, usually more than they pay in income taxes, and receive no added benefits," said former Social Security commissioner Dorcas R. Hardy.

"A woman who works outside the home and qualifies for half her husband's retirement benefit will pay Social Security payroll taxes week after week, decade after decade, but she will receive benefits no higher than those received by another woman who is not in the workforce and pays no payroll taxes at all," Hardy said.

"She might as well take those tax dollars, including the payroll taxes paid by her employer -- a total of roughly one-eighth of her income -- and start a bonfire," she said.

The overall picture is beginning to worry policymakers, as Sen. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho) made clear at the Committee on Aging hearing where most of the women's groups appeared. But there are no easy answers.

Certain fixes would help, experts say.

For example, Hotz of the Pension Rights Center said one helpful thing would be changes in the law to clarify that surviving ex-spouses have the right to their ex-husband's pension benefits unless they specifically forgo them. He said this would be particularly helpful to less sophisticated women who now often lose such benefits because they do not know to ask for them.

But broader changes, such as restructuring Social Security, providing assistance to female caregivers, equalizing women's pay and others that many groups advocate, run afoul of costs, resistance from employers and others, and fears of unintended consequences of the sort that now hit married working women under Social Security and the tax law.

So in the meantime many are urging women to educate themselves, to save and invest, and to take pension benefits into account whenever they take or leave a job.

Savings of even modest amounts over a long period can produce a substantial nest egg, one that could be enough to avoid poverty in old age. But women -- and men, too -- must understand that they have to start early and invest carefully.

Many middle-class families that have trouble saving could in fact squeeze from their budgets enough to participate in their 401(k) or other retirement plan. But lower-wage women may not be able to, even assuming they are eligible.

Said Hounsell of the Women's Institute for a Secure Retirement: "As long as women earn less money than men, work part time and experience more interruptions from paid work, retirement security will remain elusive."

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