Women Are Poorer Than Men. It Isn’t an Accident.

The “feminization of poverty” was named in 1978. U.S. poverty just hit a record low, and women are still poorer than men at almost every age. The gap is built by unpaid care, low pay and policy, and policy can take it apart.
By Teona Abuladze · 7 min read

Nearly one in three American families headed by a single mother lived in poverty last year. The exact figure, 29.5 percent, came out of the Census Bureau’s data on September 15. It was released on the same day the country celebrated the lowest poverty rate ever recorded.
Both things are true. Poverty fell. And the women raising children alone were left almost exactly where they were.
This has a name, and it’s older than most of the women it describes.
A nine-page paper
In 1978 a young sociologist named Diana Pearce published nine pages in the Urban and Social Change Review. She had gone through federal income data from the 1950s to the 1970s and found something nobody was saying out loud. By 1976, nearly two out of every three poor Americans over the age of 16 were women.
She called it “the feminization of poverty.”
Her explanation wasn’t about bad choices. Women earned less. They lost years of work to raising children. When marriages ended, the children usually stayed with them and the income didn’t. And the welfare system of the time was designed around a man who brought home the money, so a woman without one fell straight through it. Black women heading families alone fell hardest.
Pearce never stopped working on it. In 1996 she built the Self-Sufficiency Standard, a county-by-county budget of what a family actually needs for rent, childcare, food and a way to get to work. She did it because the federal poverty line, drawn in the 1960s around the price of groceries, was too low to describe anyone’s real life. She’s now emerita at the University of Washington, and in her own words the goal was always “to reframe the issue of poverty.”
What it looks like now
The Census report doesn’t lead with sex. The National Women’s Law Center ran the numbers from the same data:
• Women 18 and older in poverty: 10.5 percent. Men: 8.1 percent.
• Women 65 and older: 10.7 percent. Men 65 and older: 8.6 percent.
• Black women: 16.6 percent. Latinas: 14.4 percent.
• Single mothers’ families: 29.5 percent.
Those are official numbers, which count only cash. The Supplemental Poverty Measure also counts rent, medical bills, taxes and the aid people receive. By that measure, one in five Black women (20.3 percent) and Latinas (21.1 percent) were poor last year, and so were 16.8 percent of women over 65.
More than one in six American women over 65 is poor by the Census Bureau’s own fuller measure. Most of them worked their whole lives. A great deal of that work was never paid.
Having a job doesn’t protect you either. Of working-age women living in poverty in 2025, 38.2 percent were employed. These women go to work and still can’t cover the month.
Women working full time earned 84 cents for every dollar paid to men last year. Black women earned 64 cents for every dollar paid to white men, and they were the only group whose gap got worse.
The years that cost the most
The clearest picture of when women fall behind comes from a World Bank and UN Women study of 89 developing countries.
As small children, girls and boys are almost equally likely to be poor. Then the gap opens. Between the ages of 25 and 34, there are 122 women in poor households for every 100 men. Those are the years of babies, toddlers, sick parents, the years when somebody has to stay home. It’s almost always her.
The International Labour Organization counted them. In 2023, 708 million women worldwide were outside the paid workforce because they were caring for someone. The number of men was 40 million.
Seven hundred and eight million women are doing work the economy runs on and doesn’t pay for. That isn’t a lifestyle choice made 708 million separate times. It’s how the system is set up.
The bill arrives later. It comes as a thin retirement account and a Social Security check calculated from the years she earned little or nothing because she was raising the next generation of taxpayers. That’s why in the U.S. the gap is widest at the end of life.
A woman who spends ten years caring for her children and her mother hasn’t failed at money. She did work that no one paid her for, and she pays for it at 70.
The number you’ve heard is wrong
“Seventy percent of the world’s poor are women.” It’s on posters, in speeches, in UN slides. It usually gets traced to the UN’s Human Development Report of 1995.
That report gives no source. Duncan Green, then head of research at Oxfam GB, went looking in 2010 and found nothing. The math doesn’t work either. A 70 percent share would require more poor households headed by women than there were poor households on earth. In 2018, two World Bank economists, Carolina Sánchez-Páramo and Ana María Muñoz-Boudet, called it a “zombie statistic.” Their data put women at about half of the world’s extreme poor.
This matters because women don’t need an exaggeration to make the case. The real numbers are damning on their own. UN Women’s Gender Snapshot 2025 counts 376 million women and girls in extreme poverty, 9.2 percent of them, against 8.6 percent of men. On current trends, 351 million will still be there in 2030. A made-up number only hands critics an easy way to wave the real ones away.
Where the idea falls short
The toughest critics of the “feminization of poverty” were feminists themselves, and they were right about some of it.
Sylvia Chant, a geographer at the London School of Economics who died in 2019, did fieldwork in The Gambia, the Philippines and Costa Rica. She found that female-headed households weren’t always the poorest. Some did better than homes with a man in them, because the woman controlled the money.
What she found everywhere was the work. Women were doing more and more of the labor of getting a family through poverty, in homes run by men too. She called it the “feminization of responsibility and obligation.” She also caught aid programs doing it: paying cash to mothers on condition that they meet the program’s requirements, which quietly made poverty one more thing for women to manage.
There’s a blind spot in the data as well. Poverty is counted by household. If a family is above the line, every person in it is counted as fine, even the wife who has no money of her own. The official numbers can’t see her.
Poverty is a policy choice
The numbers move when governments decide to move them. In 2025 Social Security kept 28.8 million people out of poverty. Refundable tax credits kept 6.1 million out. SNAP kept 3.1 million.
We also know what happens when help is taken away. In 2022 the expanded Child Tax Credit expired. In one year, poverty among families with children headed by single women more than doubled, from 11.9 percent to 26.7 percent by the SPM. “Poverty is a policy choice,” Melissa Boteach of the NWLC said then. The data proved her right.
That’s why this year’s record low is fragile. The 2025 numbers mostly predate the budget law passed last July. The NWLC says its SNAP cuts have already taken food assistance away from at least 1.2 million children, and its Medicaid cuts are still rolling out. Meanwhile the Census Bureau has delayed indefinitely the survey that shows poverty state by state and for smaller groups of women. When the numbers get worse, fewer people will be able to see whose numbers they are.
The women in these statistics are not a charity case. They are raising children and caring for parents, often while holding down a job, and they’re running out of money doing it. Pearce saw them in 1978. The data still sees them now, as long as someone keeps counting.

Teona Abuladze is the founder and editor of Shansi Magazine.
Sources: Diana Pearce, “The Feminization of Poverty: Women, Work, and Welfare,” Urban and Social Change Review 11 (1978): 28–36; U.S. Census Bureau, “Poverty in the United States: 2025,” P60-290 (Sept. 15, 2026); National Women’s Law Center, “NWLC Resources on Poverty, Income, and Health Insurance in 2025” (Sept. 17, 2026), press release of Sept. 15, 2026, and “NWLC Analysis Finds Poverty Rates for Women and Families Surged From 2021 to 2022”; Congressional Research Service, “Poverty in 2025,” IN12737 (Sept. 16, 2026); Carolina Sánchez-Páramo and Ana María Muñoz-Boudet, World Bank Blogs (March 8, 2018); Duncan Green, “Are women really 70% of the world’s poor? How do we know?” From Poverty to Power, Oxfam (Feb. 3, 2010); UN Women and UN DESA, “The Gender Snapshot 2025”; ILO, “The Impact of Care Responsibilities on Women’s Labour Force Participation” (Oct. 2024); Sylvia Chant, Journal of Human Development 7:2 (2006) and Gender, Generation and Poverty (2007); University of Washington School of Social Work; Self-Sufficiency Standard, “History.”