ABSTRACT
In the US, marital status is more important than work history in determining
economic security for many older women.
Two-thirds of older women in the US
receive spouse or widow Social Security benefits. These benefits generally
require recipients to be currently married or to have had a ten-year marriage.
Declining marriage rates, coupled with shorter marriages, dramatically change
the distributional impact of these benefits on each cohort as they become
eligible for Social Security. This paper uses June 1985, 1990, and 1995 CPS
supplemental data to trace the decline in marital rates for women from five
birth cohorts. We find that the proportion of persons who will be eligible as
spouses or widows is decreasing modestly for whites and Hispanics, but
dramatically for African Americans. This growing race gap in marital rates
suggests that older black women will be particularly unlikely to qualify for these
benefits.
https://genderlibrary.org/a/images/papers/marital_status_race.pdf