This phenomenon occurs both because women tend to marry men older than themselves, and because women live longer than men. For women who live alone, poverty is a development in their golden years. Poverty affects women disproportionately throughout their lives, but particularly in their later years. Income is a particularly critical issue for older women who live alone. While some of these women are from low-income families, many face poverty for the first time, after divorce or death of a spouse.
Poverty plagues older women for several interrelated reasons.
Women tend to have limited or intermittent stays in the paid work force, largely because our society leaves to women the care of the young, sick, and old family members. The work history patterns common among women make it difficult to accrue adequate private pensions, or to become eligible for pensions at all. A woman's Social Security retirement benefits reflect any reduction in hours or absences from the paid work force. Many widows rely on the Social Security spousal benefits. Yet there are many widows who forfeit their spousal Social Security benefits if they divorce after having been married for less than ten years.