Female headship, feminization of poverty and welfare.

• Author: Kimenyi, Mwangi S.

1. Introduction

   It is now common knowledge that a strong relationship exists between family structure and the incidence of poverty. Specifically, female-headed households are at a much higher risk of slipping into poverty than male-headed households.(1) Today, sex and marital status of the head of household are the most important determinants of a family's poverty status in the United States. As a matter of fact, female-headed households have the highest poverty rates of all "high poverty" groups, including the aged and the disabled. Furthermore, the gap between the poverty rates of female-headed households and those of these other poverty groups has widened. Over the last three decades, poverty amongst female-headed households has been about three times that of all families. For example, in 1970 the poverty rate for female-headed households was 32.5 percent compared to 10.1 percent for all families. In 1991, female-headed households registered a poverty rate of 35.6 percent. The latter was significantly higher than the 11.5 percent for all families [18]. Of particular concern is the welfare of children in female-headed households. Although child poverty rates for both male- and female-headed households have declined considerably since the 1950s, child poverty rates in female-headed households have remained nearly five times as high as those in families with a male head. For example, in 1959 the child poverty rate in households of married couples was 22.4 percent, and by 1989, that rate had fallen to 10.4 percent. Although the poverty rate for children in female-headed households had fallen from 72.2 percent in 1959 to 51.1 percent in 1989, the latter rate was still significantly higher than the 1989 rate for children in the households of married couples [18]. It is the concentration of poverty amongst female-headed households that has led to the coining of the phrase feminization of poverty.(2)

   The fight against poverty has become increasingly difficult because of the dramatic increase, within the last three decades, in the proportion of families headed by females. Critics of social welfare programs claim that the war on poverty has been lost because of the transformation of the American family into family types that are more susceptible to poverty.(3) Liberal and conservative policy makers, and academics agree that one of the most important factors contributing to contemporary poverty has been the change in family structure from predominantly two-parent households to a large number of households headed by females. Because of the strong relationship between poverty and female headship, one aspect of the antipoverty debate focuses on the causes of female headship.

   There are several routes to female headship. These include marital breakdown (divorce and separation), death of a spouse, and out-of-wedlock births? The most significant contributor to female headship, and one that is of serious concern to policy makers, is out-of-wedlock births. In 1950, there were only 17.5 out-of-wedlock births for every 1,000 births to white women. This number had increased by 1980 to 110.4 per 1,000 births and to 177 per 1,000 births in 1988. For nonwhites, the number of out-of-wedlock births was 179.6 per 1,000 live births in 1950, 485.5 in 1980, and 539 in 1988. In 1970, 6.5 percent of all female heads, 2.8 percent of all white female heads, and 15.1 percent of black female heads had never been married. In 1986, 14.8 percent of white and 49.2 percent of black female heads had never been married. By 1991, the percentage of white female heads that had never married had risen to 19.4 percent; the corresponding percentage for black female heads in 1991 was 54.2 percent [19].

   Policies of the Great Society are cited as a primary cause of the transformation of the American family. Transfer payments, especially the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, are blamed for contributing to increased marital instability and out-of-wedlock births. On purely theoretical grounds, there are various reasons why the availability of welfare benefits can be expected to lead to female headship. Transfer payments reduce the cost borne by a mother in rearing a child [15, 736; 22, 1590]. Thus, those who would otherwise have delayed having children because of their inability to take care of them are less financially constrained due to the availability of welfare benefits. Since some welfare programs require that a family unit be headed by a female (absent father or single parent), in addition to a dependent child, having a child out of wedlock satisfies the eligibility requirements to participate in those programs.

   The fact that welfare benefits could lead to female headship is also consistent with the theory of marriage as formulated by Gary Becker [2; 3]. Becker suggests that traditional two-parent families were stable because both husband and wife benefitted from marital union. Males had a comparative advantage in earning market incomes while females had a comparative advantage in producing home services. As is the case with the theory of exchange, union between males and females with different comparative advantage is mutually beneficial and such a relationship is stable. The availability of welfare benefits to a female reduces the gains from being in a male-headed household. This is particularly the case if the male has low income. Thus, according to Becker's model of marriage, we expect the generosity of welfare benefits to be positively related to the number of households headed by females.

   Economic theory therefore predicts that the availability of AFDC benefits provides incentives for marital dissolution and for single women to have children out-of-wedlock. From a theoretical perspective, the more attractive the welfare benefits, the higher the birth rate to unmarried women is expected to be, ceteris paribus. The wide variations in the generosity of benefits across the 50 states and the District of Columbia provide a natural experimental setting for testing the validity of the welfare-female headship relationship. However, previous studies have produced mixed results. In a 1977 study, Moore and Caldwell [11] used data from 1971 and produced results that failed to support the...