I begin with a review of the literature that considers the gendered assumptions upon which many welfare states base their social policies. Next I present my research questions, discuss data and methods, and present analyses of how welfare states affect the poverty rates of mothers, single...

U.S. women have higher poverty rates than women in other affluent nations. In this paper I attempt to explain this disparity by examining the effect of single motherhood, employment, and social assistance on women's poverty. With cross-national comparisons of quantitative data, I find that the...

The prevalence of low income for children, especially for children in lone-parent families, varies considerably across countries. This paper considers five sets of hypotheses that may explain this cross-national variability of child poverty. The tentative conclusion from this analysis in 20...

This study set out to understand the poverty risks of single parents in the context of the rise of the dual-earner household. Data from the LIS database were used to analyze individuals and households from 18 OECD countries in the period 1984 to 2010. There were to main findings. The first is...

Social vulnerability for older persons, especially older women, due to insufficient income in retirement and earlier in life and low market earnings may be attributable to many sources, both demographic and economic, in our globalizing world. This paper examines the problems of population...

The feminisation of poverty is said to have become a common feature in the majority of advanced welfare states, but it is equally true that there has been significant variation in the feminisation of poverty from one country to another. While the concept of the feminisation of poverty remains...

Although many have expressed concern over whether generous welfare policies discourage the employment of single mothers, scholars have rarely exploited cross-national variability in the generosity of social policies to assess this question. This is the case even though much previous scholarship...

This is a chapter from a report of a comparative study of child support policy in fourteen countries (Skinner, C., Bradshaw, J. and Davidson, J. (2007) Child support policy: an international perspective, Department for Work and Pensions Research Report 405, Leeds: Corporate Document Services....

This article assesses various underlying driving factors for the evolution of household earnings inequality or 23 OECD countries from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. There are a number of factors at play. Some are related to labour market trends - increasing dispersion of individual wages and...

The aim of this article is to examine the different income sources of single parents using the method of the income packages. The concept of income package highlights the importance of both the source and the level of income of single parent families in different welfare states. These potential...