Despite major gains in overall poverty reduction, women in Latin America continue to face higher economic vulnerability than men. Disproportionate childcare responsibilities limit women’s access to paid work and income, widening gender gaps even as poverty falls. Addressing this imbalance is essential to improving living standards across the region.
Poverty is not gender neutral, yet evidence on this intersection remains limited, partly because of scarce individual-level data. Poverty is traditionally measured at the household level, which obscures differences among individuals within households. When we measure poverty by household income, assuming equal sharing of resources, it masks critical disparities—particularly between women and men.
Although individual allocations are rarely observed, recent studies have begun to address this gap. Evidence from Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina shows that resources within households are often distributed unevenly, with men typically receiving larger shares than women.
Other researchers use indirect approaches, examining poverty patterns across the life cycle and constructing household typologies based on composition and income earners rather than attempting to ‘disaggregate’ poverty by gender—a method that can obscure realities by relying on culturally biased notions such as household headship. Using these approaches, global studies find that adults with children, especially young children, face higher poverty risks, though gender patterns vary across regions.
Latin America’s paradox
Our recent study brings these methods to Latin America and the Caribbean, covering about 86% of the region’s population. The results are striking. Although poverty fell sharply between 2007 and 2021, the gender gap in poverty widened over the same period.
Women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s face significantly higher poverty rates than men of the same age, despite these being peak earning years. For women, however, this life stage coincides with the highest poverty risk.
The timing points to caregiving. Households with a child under five experience higher poverty rates than those with older children. The care demands of young children constrain women’s labor market participation, while men in the same households do not face comparable trade-offs.
These dynamics play out in familiar ways: a woman declines a promotion because childcare costs would absorb the raise; an entrepreneur closes her business when school schedules conflict with customers; a professional becomes financially dependent on a partner and vulnerable if the relationship ends.
Evolution of female and male poverty rates by age group (2007 & 2021)
Beyond the obvious explanations
Education, geography, or marital status might seem to explain these gaps, but our analysis shows otherwise. We identify four groups with statistically significant gender poverty gaps: younger women (23–28) with young children; older women (41–45) with young children; women (29–39) with school-aged children; and women (31–50) without children at home.
Even after accounting for education, location, marital status, and household structure, most of the gender poverty gap remains unexplained. Education reduces women’s poverty risk, but this protection is offset by household demographics and economic structure.
Women are overrepresented in households with no earners or only one earner. Single mothers face especially high risks, shouldering both earning and caregiving without a partner’s income or time. Yet even in two-parent households, women exhibit higher poverty rates, indicating that a partner’s presence does not equalize economic vulnerability.
The largest gender gap appears among women aged 31–50 without children at home, likely reflecting the cumulative effects of earlier career interruptions—skills that depreciated, promotions forgone, and lower lifetime earnings. The motherhood penalty persists long after active caregiving ends.
What this means for policy
Latin America’s poverty reduction gains are real, but they have been pursued with tools designed for a gender-neutral problem, not a gendered one.
When women lack economic power during their most productive years, family well-being suffers. Evidence shows that child support payments reduce poverty and food insecurity among single-mother families, but only when non-resident parents can pay reliably and enforcement is effective.
The policy options are well known: affordable childcare that enables mothers to work; parental leave that does not fall solely on women; stronger protections for informal workers; effective enforcement of child support; and recognition of unpaid care as economic work. However, implementation remains the challenge
Latin America has demonstrated it can reduce poverty. The question is whether it can do so equitably—through policies that account for how household structure, care responsibilities, and labor market discrimination interact across women’s lives.
The data are clear: gender gaps persist and are widening, even as overall poverty declines. Only targeted, sustained action can deliver the broadly shared prosperity the region seeks.