Gender and Welfare Policy

Last reviewed: February 2017

Abstract

Gender and welfare policies are inherently related because around the world, 60 percent of all people living in poverty are women. Health status is another major factor in determining vulnerability to poverty, and women with health problems are one-fifth as likely as other women to be able to hold down jobs. Policymakers at both the national and state levels are predominately white males. Welfare policies in the United States are further complicated by bipartisan battles, and feminists insist that the Republican Party has declared war on women and children.

Overview

In the United States, gender has always been a factor in policies intended to help the poor. From the 1600s to the 1900s, Americans dealt with the poor by sending them to workhouses, poorhouses, or poor farms. In colonial America, the emphasis was on providing assistance to the needy poor, and women and children were generally considered unable to care for themselves. As a result, most communities were willing to help widows and their children. However, giving birth outside of wedlock was frowned upon, and single mothers were not considered “deserving.” Over time, a stigma developed concerning welfare, and some people have consistently refused to seek help even when needed because they have been afraid of being considered “shiftless” and “no account.”

The first federal programs designed to put unemployed people to work began during the Great Depression as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Through programs such as the Works Progress Administration, the Civil Works Administration, and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the federal government put unemployed people to work doing everything from writing government pamphlets and teaching classes to cutting down trees and making improvements at national parks. However, most of the jobs were for white males, who were expected to provide for their families. Single mothers, on the other hand were dependent on welfare. At the same time, many employers chose to hire women rather than men for available jobs because they could pay women workers lower wages. African Americans were not considered eligible for welfare in many states because of discriminatory policies.

The idea of paying males a family wage was born in the early twentieth century when automaker Henry Ford instituted the family wage for his male workers. Despite an influx of women into the workplace and the rise in single parenting over the course of the century, the notion that men should earn higher wages than women persisted. The family wage managed to survive throughout Western nations because it was protected by the provision of social insurance to male heads-of-household, by direct financial support to homemakers and mothers in some countries, and by welfare programs for the poor. Those welfare programs were chiefly populated by women, dependent children, the disabled, and the chronically ill.

The outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939 ushered in the beginning of the end of the Great Depression in the United States. The United States entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the war ended in April 1945. The postwar years were prosperous in the United States, and a general attitude developed in which welfare recipients were seen as lazy and unwilling to work. T. J. Haney (2011) suggests that poverty in the postwar years was often the result of barriers to employment and the dynamics of neighborhoods in which welfare recipients were likely to live. Using data generated by the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, Haney found that poverty was highly related to health problems and to neighborhood conditions that included disorder, unemployment, and the median age of structures within the community.

In the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson initiated the War on Poverty and established new government work programs as well as Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor. Some work programs, including the Work Incentives Program, Job Opportunities, and Basic Skills were designed to provide training for welfare recipients. In the 1970s, the Nixon administration worked with Congress to create the Public Employment and Public Service Employment programs as part of the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. Like most work programs, women and minorities were not considered when forming policies.

The poorest women and children are most likely to live in developing countries; but even in the developed world, high divorce and out-of-wedlock birthrates often force women and children into the poorest segments of the population. Poverty rates were significantly higher among all single-parent families, rising to 30.6 percent for single-mother-headed households.

Further Insights

After several decades of backlash against the U.S. welfare system of entitlement, the welfare system was overhauled in 1996 with passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). The emphasis of the reform was to move as many people as possible off welfare and into the job market. States were given responsibility for controlling access to welfare, leading to a wide variation in welfare policies. At the federal level, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program was replaced with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which limited lifetime eligibility to five years. Critics of the 1996 welfare efforts suggest that lawmakers concentrated on getting female recipients off welfare but failed to address such issues as urban poverty, joblessness, racial segregation, language proficiency, and community disorder (Haney, 2011).

Other countries also reformed welfare policies. For example, the United Kingdom undertook major welfare reforms in the spring of 2010 under a coalition government (Bennett & Sung, 2014), leading to passage of the Welfare Reform Bill in 2011, which focused on simplifying welfare while continuing to protect women and children who were vulnerable to poverty. Across Europe and in Hong Kong, the majority of welfare recipients are young single mothers with low levels of education. Welfare programs ensure that they receive cash benefits while participating in a mandatory work programs (Chang, 2010). Australia, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, and Spain have managed to reduce welfare caseloads by levels ranging from 19 to 54 percent (Chang, 2010).

Beth Reingold and Adrienne Smith (2012) argue that since passage of PRWORA, welfare policies in the various states have been significantly influenced by race and ethnicity. They suggest that having African Americans and Latinos in state legislatures has helped to mitigate the negative impacts of race and ethnicity on state welfare policies. In general, females tend to be more supportive than males of welfare programs. Reingold and Smith found that TANF policies are more liberal when a high percentage of state legislators are female, when the party controlling the legislature has only a slim majority, when female legislators are significantly represented on committees that deal with welfare; and when such committees are relatively autonomous. They maintain that female legislators are able to provide the highest level of support for female-friendly welfare policies when women are in positions of power within the party leadership. Geography has also been shown to exert a major influence on the availability of welfare benefits. Since each state sets its own guidelines, benefits may vary greatly. In Mississippi, for example, a family of three earned $170 a month in 2003 while a three-member family living in Alaska drew $923 per month.

In 1996, the last year that AFDC dispensed benefits, 87 percent of all recipients were female. In 2006, a decade after the establishment of TANF, the number of female recipients had climbed to 90 percent (Reingold & Smith, 2012). Despite changing mores since colonial times and widespread acceptance of single motherhood, attitudes of both lawmakers and taxpayers toward welfare tend to be influenced by moralistic views that have led to attempts to control the morals of welfare recipients. These attitudes have led to policies that allow officials to make specific demands that are often considered intrusive by recipients and by critics of existing welfare programs. Critics of TANF also argue that, overall, women and children are poorer under the program than under AFDC. They point out that large numbers of women who moved into the workplace are laboring at minimum-wage jobs that fail to provide sufficient incomes for themselves and their families.

Discourse

In one longitudinal study of why women may be forced back onto welfare, T. Cheng (2010) discovered that between 11 and 33 percent of welfare recipients are forced to return to the welfare rolls even if they manage to get a minimum-wage job because of low levels of education and a lack of necessary skills. As national and state economies fluctuated, so did the need for welfare. Cheng found that other likely factors in the return to welfare were high national or regional unemployment rates, a lack of service-job skills, restrictive state welfare policies, the need for Medicaid and/or food stamps, and being Hispanic. Characteristics linked to self-sufficiency after a period of receiving welfare were related to the availability of general government assistance, the availability of housing assistance, the availability of full-time work, having relevant job skills, obtaining a college degree, getting married, and being African American.

In 2013, J. W. Kim and Y. J. Choi examined the feminization of poverty in Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, comparing poverty among the elderly, the non-elderly, and single-parent households. They concluded that while some countries had made progress by slowing or reversing the feminization of poverty, the differences in male and female poverty levels are still evident. From the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, the portion of female-headed families rose from 24.7 percent to 37.4 percent, and that increase was consistent whether governments were liberal or conservative (Kim & Choi, 2013).

In 2016, women earned around 80 cents on every dollar earned by males, and the differences were true across virtually every occupation, even in female-dominated occupations such as teaching and nursing. What women make throughout their working lives determines what they will have to live on when they retire. Thus, poverty hits elderly women particularly hard because they are at a time in their lives when the need for medical assistance may not always be met with Medicare, and Social Security may not pay enough to meet daily needs. While the poorest women may receive assistance from Medicaid and state assistance programs, scores of others make just enough to be ineligible for those programs even though they do not draw enough from Medicare to meet the costs of providing for themselves and paying for doctors’ visits, pharmaceuticals, and other medical needs.

One in five divorced women over the age of 65 lives in poverty. That number rises to 22 percent for divorced women 80 years and older. Divorced women are allowed to draw an auxiliary benefit from a former spouse’s earnings only if the couple was married for more than 10 years and if her own earnings are less than half of the Social Security benefits paid to her former spouse. If the spouse dies, such women become eligible for the increased benefit. Widows draw the auxiliary benefit regardless of how many years they were married. This means that a widow married only a year could draw the auxiliary benefit, but a divorcee married 25 years might not qualify.

While welfare is generally viewed as the province of the permanently poor and the chronically ill or disabled, others may turn to welfare when struck by disasters such as losing a job, divorce, major illness of a family member, or a natural disaster. Because large numbers of Americans live from paycheck-to-paycheck, such disasters may wreak havoc with family finances relatively quickly. However, the stigma of being a welfare recipient may cause some people to refuse to seek help. This is particularly true within cultures where self-sufficiency is highly prized.

Terms & Concepts

Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC): Federal anti-poverty program that began in 1935 during the Great Depression as Aid to Dependent Children, which Congress created under the Social Security Act. Later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the program was designed to alleviate the financial suffering of the nation’s poorest children, who tended to live in female-headed households, by providing financial assistance to their families.

Community Disorder: Term used to describe malfunctioning communities in urban areas where residents are constantly faced with broken windows, graffiti, and public intoxication. Such communities are home to large segments of poor people who cannot afford to live elsewhere. Conditions are unsafe, and residents often deal daily with gangs, prostitution, and high incidences of substance abuse.

Feminization of Poverty: Also known as the “pauperization of women,” the term is used to explain the fact that throughout the world, women and their dependent children are impoverished by societies that consider women’s work to be of less value than that of men. In developed countries, this means that women are frequently paid less for doing the same work as their male coworkers. In developing nations, it means that women are often shunted into the informal work sector where they are paid almost nothing and have no benefits such as health care insurance.

Great Depression: The worst financial disaster to ever strike the United States, the Great Depression began with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929. Unemployment rose from three percent in 1929 to 25 percent by 1933 before falling to 19 percent in 1938. The depression ended with the outbreak of World War II as a result of the need to furnish supplies to Allied nations.

Medicaid: Federal program instituted in 1965 to provide health care assistance to the poor. Changes to the program allow pregnant women, the disabled, and people with chronic illness that require long-term care to receive Medicaid. Access to the program is controlled by states, and state policies vary greatly. In 2014, President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care program extended Medicaid eligibility to non-elderly individuals whose incomes fall below 133 percent of the poverty line established by the federal government.

Medicare: Federal program established in 1965 to provide medical assistance to individuals aged 65 and over. Passage of the Medicare Prescription Improvement and Modernization Act in 2003 led to the creation of Medicare Advantage Plans, which provides health/drug benefits in a single plan to eligible members. Optional drug benefit plans were made available to all Medicare recipients in 2006.

New Deal: Anti-depression policies instituted by President Franklin Roosevelt after he was elected in 1932. The first 100 days of his administration were filled with a flurry of new laws and policies and the creation of new government agencies that ultimately turned the United States into a social welfare state.

Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF): Federal government program created in 1996 to replace the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program as part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) Act. The welfare reforms of 1996 established a program that provides federal grants to states to help them operate state welfare programs.

Bibliography

Abramovitz, M. (2006). Welfare reform in the united states: Gender, race and class matter. Critical Social Policy, 26(2), 336–364. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=21044837&site=ehost-live

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Béland, D., Howard, C., & Morgan, K. (2015). The Oxford handbook of U.S. social policy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Bennett, F., & Sung, S. (2014). Money matters: Using qualitative research for policy influencing on gender and welfare reform.” The European Journal of Social Sciences 27(1), 5–19. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=94420278&site=ehost-live

Cheng, T. (2010). Financial self-sufficiency or return to welfare? A longitudinal study of mothers among the working poor. International Journal of Social Welfare, 19(2), 162–172. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=48328767&site=ehost-live

Fothergill, A. (2003). The stigma of charity: Gender, class, and disaster assistance. Sociological Quarterly, 44(4), 659–680. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=12026761&site=ehost-live

Haney, T. J. (2011). The geographic context of “personal responsibility”: The spatiality of employment and welfare receipt among unmarried urban women. Women’s Health and Urban Life, 10(2), 13–36. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=67302407&site=ehost-live

Kim, J. W., & Choi, Y. J. (2013). Feminisation of poverty in 12 welfare states: Consolidating cross-regime variations? International Journal of Social Welfare, 22(4), 347–359. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=89658700&site=ehost-live

McCarthy, L. (2015). Gender equality in the welfare state? People, Place & Policy Online, 9(3), 207–211. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=111992281&site=ehost-live

Reingold, B., & Smith A. (2012). Welfare policymaking and intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender in U.S. state legislatures. American Journal of Political Science, 56(1), 131–147.

Suggested Reading

Bernstein, M., Naples, N. A., & Harvey, B. (2016). The meaning of marriage to same-sex families: Formal partnership, parenthood, gender, and the welfare state in international perspective. Social Politics: International Studies In Gender, State & Society, 23(1), 3–39. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=114399922&site=ehost-live

Fullerton, A. S., McCollum, D. B., & Dixon, J. C. (2015). A comparative perspective on the relationship between job insecurity and health: Welfare regimes, autonomy, and the moderating role of gender. Conference Papers—American Sociological Association, 1–29. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=111785731&site=ehost-live

Johnson, C. M, Duerst-Lahti, G., & Norton, N. (2007). Creating gender: The sexual politics of welfare policy. Boulder, CO: Lynne-Rienner Publishers.

Morgan, K. (2006). Working mothers and the welfare state: Religion and the politics on work-family policies in Western Europe and the United States. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Saxonberg, S. (2013). From defamilialization to degenderization: Toward a new welfare typology1 from defamilialization to degenderization: Toward a new welfare typology. Social Policy & Administration, 47(1), 26–49. Retrieved October 23, 2016, from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=84652695&site=ehost-live