Age, gender, household composition, and poverty?

The vast majority of poor people in the United States are women and children. Children under age eighteen, who make up 25 percent of the US population, account for over 40 percent of the poor. About one in five children age eighteen and under lives in poverty (see Table 2.1). The percentage of children under six years of age who live in poverty-level households is even higher: In 1994, about one in four was considered poor. When children under age six live in households headed by women with no adult male present, almost two-thirds are poor. Chil­dren of working-poor parents are the fastest grow­ing segment of children living in poverty (Holmes, 1996b). More than half of all poor children live in families in which one or both parents work outside the home (US Bureau of Census, 1996a).

About two-thirds of all adults living in poverty are women: households headed by women are the fastest-growing segment of the overall poverty population. Researchers have discovered a number of rea­sons why single-parent families headed by women are at such a great risk of poverty. Single-parent families typically have fewer employed adults in them and therefore a lower annual income than most two-parent households, and women generally earn less money than men, even for comparable work. Women bear the major economic burden for their children, and contributions from absent fathers in the form of child support and alimony payments ac­count for less than 10 percent of family income. About 43 percent of unmarried mothers with in­comes above poverty level receive child support from the fathers; however, only 25 percent of unmarried mothers at or below the poverty line receive such support (US House of Representatives, 1994). Soci­ologist Diana Pearce (1978) refers to the association between gender and poverty as the feminization of poverty – the trend whereby women are dispropor­tionately represented among individuals living in poverty. On the basis of research on the feminization of poverty, some sociologists suggest that high rates of female poverty are related to women’s unique vul­nerability to event-driven poverty – poverty resulting from the loss of a job, disability, desertion by a spouse, separation, divorce, or widowhood (Weitzman. 1985; Bane, 1986; Kurz, 1995).

Race, ethnicity, and poverty

African Americans, Latinos/as, and Native Americans are overrepresented among people living in poverty (see Figure 2.5). Across racial-ethnic cat­egories, about three times as many African American families and Latina/o families lived in poverty in 1994 as non-Latina/o white families (US Bureau of the Census, 1995a). Within racial-ethnic categories, fewer than one in ten (non-Latino/a) whites fell below the official poverty level in 1994, in contrast to 14.6 percent of all Asian and Pacific Islanders, 30.6 percent of all African Americans, and 30.7 per­cent of all Latinos/as.

Differences in household composition show a stark contrast in poverty rates. In households head­ed by women with no husband present, about half of all Latina/o families (52.1 percent) and African American families (46.2 percent) had incomes below the official poverty level in 1994, in contrast to 29 percent of white (non-Latino/a) families. Recent re­search suggests that two out of three African Amer­ican families headed by women were poor before the family event that made the woman a single mother (Bane and Ellwood, 1994). According tо sociologist Demie Kurz (1995), the feminization of poverty is intensified by the racialization of poverty – the process by which the effects of low income are made even worse by racial discrimination, which is expe­rienced by all people of color but particularly by women who are single heads of household.