Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Most North American and European countries are undergoing dramatic demographic changes, particularly increases in women’s paid labor force participation and the retreat from marriage. These trends have fed calls to reform welfare state benefit structures in these countries. Altering welfare state policies, however, will impact how benefit distribution shapes gender, race, and class inequalities. Social Security reform in the United States provides a case study to examine how different reform typologies would impact inequality. The literature focused on welfare state typologies and distribution has paid careful attention to gender and class inequalities, but has been less successful in considering the impact on race and class inequities among women. There are two types of reforms to Social Security that would be focused on gender-based inequalities. Welfare states could attempt to spread the risks associated with marital dissolution or they could reward unpaid family care work. A reform focused largely on class-based inequality would be to introduce a citizenship-based minimum benefit. I analyze how gender-based versus-class based reforms impact inequities among women. I use the 1992 Health and Retirement Study with merged Social Security earnings’ data to quantitatively evaluate the impact of these reforms on the distribution of benefits among women. Using an altered two-part model (Manning et al. 1987), I find that moving away from marital status, even a benefit that helps soften the negative economic impact of marital dissolution, and towards care or citizenship will produce the most progressive benefit structure for future cohorts of beneficiaries. But it is also clear that benefits focused on reducing class inequalities, such as a citizenship based minimum benefit, as opposed to gender inequalities, are the most successful at softening race and class inequalities among both present and future cohorts of beneficiaries.