The gender poverty gap in developed countries: Causes and cures

This article employs the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) to compare poverty rates for female-headed families and for other families in a number of developed countries. It then seeks to explain why, in some countries, poverty for female-headed families is so much higher compared to other families. The article finds that there is no single reason for this. Rather, there are many different reasons female-headed families suffer relatively greater poverty in some countries but not in other countries. One implication of this analysis is that it is less important what gets done to help female-headed families, and more important that some policy be employed to benefit female-headed families. The rest of this article is organized as follows. The first section describes the LIS. The next section discusses the problems encountered in measuring poverty, and computes poverty rates for female-headed families and for all other families using 15 countries in the LIS database. Theoretical explanations for poverty are presented in the third section. This discussion emphasizes why poverty rates may differ based upon the gender of the family head. The following section tests the usual group of suspects that were rounded up in the previous section, and finds them all to be inadequate. The next section employs a more simple and direct approach to the problem. It examines countries individually in order to find out what they are doing to assist female-headed families and how this affects the national gender poverty gap. The final section concludes with some policy implications.