As we move through this primary season, the Voter Participation Center will profile unmarried women, their role in the electorate and economy in each of the contested states, starting with Iowa.

On February 1, the Iowa caucuses will provide a unique forum for civic engagement. The first official contest in the nominating process for President of the United States is an old-fashioned exercise in participatory democracy. On election night, voters go to designated precent locations to show their support for their candidates, listen to appeals for support from each campaign, and then vote. The caucuses first-in-the-nation position on the calendar gives the state enormous influence on the nation’s politics every four years. 

Here’s an updated look at the median earnings, health insurance coverage and poverty rates for unmarried women in 16 states. These profiles provide detailed demographic and economic portraits of the growing number of increasingly politically-powerful single women.

A new study from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) and the AARP reinforces other research findings that women bear the brunt of the student-loan burden, with women of all races holding student debts that totaled at least 80% of their income one year after graduation.

African-American women carry the greatest debt, with an average student debt load totaling 111% of their income—meaning that even if the average African-American woman was able to devote her entire income in the first year after college graduation to paying off her student loans, she still wouldn’t be out of debt.

“The narrowing of the pay gap may have at least temporarily stalled,” writes Eric Morath of the Wall Street Journal in his analysis of new Q3 2015 data from the Labor Department:

The latest data marks the third straight quarter that the increase in male earnings was at least double that of female workers. As a result, women who work full time earned 81.1 cents for every dollar a man earned from July through September. That’s down more than a penny from a year earlier.

A look at median income by marital status reveals two facts to consider as the nation and states contemplate increasing the minimum wage, allowing workers to earn paid sick time, and enacting other policies and programs that would touch and improve the lives of most Americans:

From Vauhini Vara at The New Yorker, here’s a look into the existing research on the pay gap between men and women, and what California’s Fair Pay Act—signed by governor Jerry Brown on October 6—will do to address that gap.

In California, the Fair Pay Act puts in place some provisions similar to [the proposed federal Paycheck Fairness Act]; it also bars employers from setting wages for any of its employees at rates lower than those paid to employees of the opposite sex for similar work—not only for equal work—and applies to people who work at different offices for the same employer.

As part of our year-round voter registration program, the Voter Participation Center is helping to register unmarried women, people of color, and young voters—the groups that make up the Rising American Electorate (RAE)—for the 2016 election. VPC is mailing voter registration forms to 1.4 million RAE members in 8 states. (You can read more about our mail program here.)

This is National Unmarried and Single Americans Week and all this week we have been highlighting new U.S. Census Bureau data documenting the size and power of this fast-growing demographic group —focused particularly on unmarried women. We want to end this week with data derived from Census figures about unmarried women, their potential to make up a quarter of the national 2016 electorate and their power to decide next year’s elections.