TomPaine.com - Adjusting For Women:

Representative Bill Thomas (R-CA), chair of House Ways and Means Committee, amazingly floated "gender and race adjusting benefits." In these women should get less because they live longer and blacks should get more because they have shorter lifetimes.

There are other ways to look at this. Women already work for lower wages and spend more time out of the workforce caring for children and aging parents. Let's adjust for that!

"In 2003, the last full year for which we have Census Bureau earnings data for full-time, year-round workers, women earned only 75.5 cents for every $1 men earned. Adjusting women's benefits upward to compensate for that lower pay, would mean an increase in their benefits of 32.5 percent to bring them in line with men's benefits."

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research recently estimated that the typical woman earns just 38 cents for each $1.00 the typical man earns over a lifetime, taking years out of the workforce into account. Social Security benefits are based on the highest 35 years of earnings (and the years women spend at home are averaged in at $0). To compensate women for the impact of this lost time doing unpaid care work, women's benefits would need to be increased by 163 percent—more than double.
Similarly, let's look at the reasons that black Americans live shorter lives and fix those -- better healthcare, more opportunity.