(Feminist Academic & Policy Analyst)
Between 2020 and 2025, the United States underwent some of the most turbulent economic and political shifts in decades. From pandemic recovery packages to major tax reform bills, these policies shaped not only GDP curves but the lived realities of millions of families — especially single mothers, who continue to stand at the intersection of economic precarity and gendered responsibility.
From a nonpartisan feminist academic lens, this piece examines how policies from both Republican and Democratic administrations during this five-year period have impacted single-mother households — economically, socially, and structurally. We aim not to assign blame but to highlight how fiscal and social policy, regardless of ideology, often reproduces inequities that single mothers disproportionately bear.
Why Single Mothers Matter?
Single-mother households constitute a powerful and often underexamined lens through which to evaluate a nation’s moral and material priorities. Their experiences are not marginal, but statistically and structurally central. As of 2024, approximately 24% of all children in the United States live in single-parent households, and over 80% of those households are headed by women (U.S. Census Bureau, 2024). This demographic reality places single mothers at the heart of public policy outcomes related to child welfare, economic equity, and social mobility.
The economic conditions faced by single mothers reveal a persistent pattern of institutional neglect. National data consistently show that single mothers experience poverty at more than twice the rate of the general population, and they are overrepresented in sectors marked by low wages, irregular hours, and lack of benefits. These structural conditions are exacerbated by the compounded effects of caregiving without a second source of income, and by a policy environment that frequently treats single-parent households as statistical outliers rather than central constituencies. As a result, even minor adjustments to social safety net programs — such as modifications in the eligibility thresholds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), reductions in the scope or duration of the Child Tax Credit (CTC), or stagnant childcare subsidies — produce disproportionately large consequences. These changes can immediately affect a household’s ability to afford food, retain housing, or maintain access to consistent early education and healthcare services for children.
Beyond the material dimensions, single-mother households also offer a moral and political barometer of a society’s commitments. When economic policy choices are made — be it through tax legislation, social spending decisions, or austerity measures — the effects often cascade most forcefully through the lives of single mothers. These households experience first-hand whether policy translates into material support or symbolic rhetoric. The gaps between intention and implementation are rarely abstract for them; they are experienced in skipped meals, unaffordable childcare, reduced work hours, and chronic stress. These burdens are not evenly distributed — they fall most heavily on Black, Latina, Indigenous, and immigrant single mothers, who face intersectional disadvantages shaped by race, class, and citizenship status.
Historically, single motherhood has been stigmatized in public discourse, often framed as a personal failure rather than a product of broader socioeconomic forces. Yet policy decisions — including punitive welfare reforms in the 1990s, the fluctuating generosity of tax credits, and the persistent exclusion of caregiving labor from formal economic valuation — have played a definitive role in producing and perpetuating the economic vulnerability of this group. As such, single mothers are not simply a demographic category; they are indicators of how the state mediates caregiving, gendered labor, and familial responsibility.
When we interrogate what our fiscal and social policies reveal about collective priorities, single mothers are often the first to reflect the consequences — both intended and unintended. Their economic and social position exposes the fault lines of a policy system that continues to struggle with recognizing caregiving as essential labor and with designing structures that support, rather than penalize, non-normative family forms. In this light, the condition of single-mother households is not only a measure of poverty or need, but a reflection of the nation’s values — of who is seen, who is supported, and who is left to navigate systemic neglect alone.
Economic Reality: Data and Context
Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic disparities between single-mother households and their two-parent counterparts were already stark. In 2019, the median annual income for single-mother families stood at approximately $49,000, while two-parent households reported a median income more than double that, at around $104,000 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020). This income gap reflects longstanding structural inequalities — not just in household composition, but also in labor market access, wage discrimination, and the valuation of unpaid caregiving.
When COVID-19 struck in early 2020, these pre-existing vulnerabilities were amplified. The initial wave of job losses hit service-oriented, caregiving, and education sectors hardest — industries that are disproportionately staffed by women, and in particular by women of color. The National Women’s Law Center reported that women lost more than 5.4 million jobs in 2020, accounting for the vast majority of net job losses that year (NWLC, 2021). Within this broader trend, single mothers were especially impacted, as many held part-time or informal jobs without benefits, lacked access to remote work, and faced immediate caregiving demands due to school and daycare closures. For many, this created a dual crisis of lost income and increased unpaid labor.
While job recovery efforts under the Biden administration led to a rebound in overall employment by 2023, the quality and sustainability of that recovery for single mothers has been uneven. Rising inflation, surging housing costs, and the persistent absence of affordable childcare have eroded many of the nominal gains in employment. As of 2025, nearly one in three single mothers reports being unable to afford childcare, and two in five face housing insecurity — often defined by late rent payments, overcrowding, or risk of eviction (Urban Institute, 2025). These figures are not simply economic indicators; they represent a daily struggle to maintain stability under conditions of chronic precarity.
These structural pressures shape how fiscal policy translates into lived experience. For single mothers, economic recovery cannot be measured solely by aggregate job numbers or GDP growth. Instead, it must be assessed through the lens of access — to stable employment, to affordable housing, to childcare, and to policies that recognize and support the dual economic and caregiving roles they perform. Without such a lens, broad policy measures risk obscuring the reality that single mothers continue to carry a disproportionate share of economic instability in the post-pandemic economy.
In this context, the effectiveness of fiscal policy hinges not only on the scale of investment but also on its design and delivery. Targeted supports — such as expanded childcare subsidies, refundable tax credits, and inclusive housing assistance — are essential to ensure that economic recovery is not merely statistical, but structural and sustainable for those most impacted by the pandemic’s fallout.
Policy Context (2020–2025)
Between 2020 and 2025, U.S. social and fiscal policy underwent dramatic oscillations, swinging between periods of expansive public investment and sharp retrenchment. These shifts were not only political but structural, reflecting competing visions of the role of government in mitigating poverty, managing crisis, and shaping economic opportunity. For vulnerable households — particularly those led by single mothers — these policy reversals translated into alternating periods of short-term relief and renewed instability.
In 2020 and 2021, under a Democratic-led federal response to the COVID-19 crisis, the U.S. enacted some of its most ambitious anti-poverty interventions in decades. Key among these was the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which temporarily expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC), transforming it into a fully refundable monthly benefit. For the first time, families in the lowest income brackets — including those with no taxable income — were eligible for direct payments. The results were immediate and profound: child poverty fell by 46% in 2021, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, a reduction largely attributable to the expanded CTC and pandemic relief programs such as stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment insurance (Census Bureau, 2022). These policies offered a temporary restructuring of the social safety net — shifting away from punitive, work-conditioned aid toward more universal and accessible cash support.
However, this period of expansion was short-lived. As political momentum waned and concerns about rising inflation took center stage, many of the temporary provisions expired by the end of 2021. Throughout 2022 and into 2023, the focus of federal economic policy shifted toward fiscal restraint and inflation control, sidelining the ambitious social agenda of the early pandemic response. Without congressional agreement to extend the expanded CTC, families lost monthly support just as food, rent, and fuel prices surged. The consequences were swift: child poverty more than doubled between 2021 and 2022, with over 5 million children pushed below the poverty line — disproportionately from single-parent, Black, and Latinx households (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2023). At the same time, eligibility for core programs like SNAP and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) remained narrow, and federal investments in childcare and housing stagnated.
By 2024–2025, following Republican electoral gains, federal policy took a sharper turn toward austerity-driven reform. The passage of a sweeping fiscal legislation package — referred to in media coverage as the “megabill” — prioritized tax reductions for high-income individuals and corporations while imposing new conditions on social welfare access. Notably, the legislation introduced stricter work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP recipients, despite widespread evidence that such measures reduce participation without increasing employment. Analyses from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) indicated a stark distributional shift: the bottom 10% of earners stood to lose an average of $1,600 annually in net benefits, while the top 10% would gain approximately $12,000 through tax cuts and investment incentives (CBPP, 2025).
This five-year cycle — from emergency-based social expansion to a rollback under the banner of fiscal prudence — illustrates a recurring pattern in American policymaking: temporary relief in times of crisis, followed by structural retrenchment once political and economic pressures shift. Such oscillations are not merely fiscal decisions; they reflect deeper ideological tensions over who deserves public support and how the burdens of economic risk are distributed. For single-mother households, these shifts were not abstract. They determined the presence or absence of monthly income, access to healthcare, food security, and the possibility of stable employment. The return to conditionality and austerity in 2024–2025 signaled not only a change in budget priorities, but a re-entrenchment of the very inequalities that pandemic-era policy briefly alleviated.
Comparative Effects: GOP vs. Democratic Policies
While media coverage often frames social policy debates in starkly partisan terms, a feminist academic lens urges a more nuanced inquiry — not merely who passed the legislation, but who ultimately benefits from it, and who bears its costs. This framework centers distributive outcomes and structural impact rather than ideological intent, offering critical insight into how economic and social policy either disrupts or reinforces gendered hierarchies.
During 2020 and 2021, under Democratic leadership, the federal government enacted a series of expansive, emergency-based social policies that delivered measurable improvements for single-mother households. Chief among these were the refundable Child Tax Credit (CTC) expansion and federal childcare stabilization funds introduced through the American Rescue Plan. These interventions not only increased household income but also reduced administrative barriers to access, allowing more families — particularly those in the lowest income brackets — to benefit. Empirical studies found that the expanded CTC alone reduced poverty among single-mother households by approximately 35% (Parolin et al., 2022), while early assessments linked these supports to improvements in maternal mental health, reduced food insecurity, and more stable childcare arrangements. This period marked a rare moment in which social policy aligned with feminist economic principles: recognizing caregiving as labor, supporting redistribution, and reducing the punitive conditions often imposed on public benefits.
By contrast, the fiscal policy agenda advanced under Republican leadership during 2024 and 2025 emphasized deficit reduction, deregulation, and the reintroduction of conditionality into public assistance. The centerpiece of this agenda — a sweeping fiscal package branded as a tool for “fiscal responsibility” — reimposed work requirements for Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and introduced new restrictions on access to benefits. Supporters argued that such policies promote “self-sufficiency” and reduce government dependency. However, decades of policy research consistently show that work requirements tend to reduce participation in essential programs without producing meaningful increases in employment, especially among caregivers who face time poverty, inflexible work hours, and lack of affordable childcare (CBPP, 2025; Hahn et al., 2023). These measures disproportionately affect single mothers — particularly Black and Latina women — who already face multiple intersecting barriers to stable employment.
Taken together, these contrasting policy periods reveal a deeper structural pattern: both major political parties have enacted measures that significantly affect single-mother households, yet neither has pursued a sustained, gender-responsive policy agenda that addresses the root causes of economic vulnerability. Democratic-led expansions have often been temporary, tethered to crisis conditions, and vulnerable to political reversal. Republican-led retrenchments, while framed as structural reform, tend to shift risk and responsibility onto the very populations least equipped to absorb them.
A feminist analysis highlights that what is often described as political pragmatism or fiscal realism can, in practice, serve to obscure the gendered labor of caregiving and the disproportionate burdens borne by single mothers. Without durable, systemic reform — including universal childcare, comprehensive paid leave, and permanent cash transfers — public policy will continue to fluctuate between episodic support and structural neglect, leaving the economic security of single-mother households perpetually vulnerable to ideological tides rather than grounded in equity or evidence.
Gendered Dimensions of Poverty and Care Work
Single mothers are not merely economic units or welfare recipients; they are essential agents in the reproduction of society, performing the dual roles of wage earners and primary caregivers. Their labor sustains not only their own families but the broader social fabric — yet it remains chronically undervalued and structurally unsupported. Feminist economists such as Nancy Folbre and Marilyn Waring have long contended that this devaluation is not accidental but ideological: care work is consistently marginalized in economic policy because it is feminized, unpaid, and rendered invisible within traditional models of productivity and GDP accounting. As Folbre (2001) argues, economies rest on a “care economy” that is indispensable yet unrecognized — a foundational paradox in modern capitalism.
This dynamic is particularly acute for single mothers, who navigate both paid and unpaid labor without the support structures available to partnered or dual-income households. They work longer hours in the formal labor market while simultaneously shouldering nearly all of the unpaid reproductive labor — including childcare, household management, and emotional caregiving — often without access to affordable childcare, paid family leave, or predictable work schedules. As of 2025, time-use data shows that single mothers spend on average 2.5 times more unpaid caregiving hours per week than single fathers, underscoring the gendered imbalance in domestic labor (American Time Use Survey, 2025). These hours are not marginal; they shape everything from employment choices to health outcomes and educational attainment for children.
When welfare policy, particularly in the form of work requirements, fails to account for this labor, it effectively penalizes caregiving itself. Policies that condition access to Medicaid, SNAP, or TANF on formal employment hours erase the economic value of unpaid care work and impose unrealistic expectations on solo caregivers. They also reproduce a binary that equates labor only with market participation, ignoring the unpaid labor that is necessary for that market to function. Far from promoting “self-sufficiency,” such requirements often deepen economic insecurity by forcing single mothers to choose between caring for their children and maintaining essential benefits. Moreover, this logic reinforces racial and gender stereotypes — framing low-income women, particularly women of color, as needing discipline through conditionality rather than deserving of dignity and structural support.
A feminist economic framework reframes this dynamic: instead of treating caregiving as a private burden or moral duty, it situates it as socially necessary labor that warrants public investment. The refusal to recognize this labor in policy design is not a matter of administrative oversight, but a political choice — one that reveals whose labor is valued, and whose is rendered invisible. Addressing this requires more than expanding access to childcare or tax credits; it demands a paradigmatic shift in how we understand economic contribution, time, and care in both policymaking and public discourse.
Structural Inequality and Intersectionality
A feminist intersectional framework reveals that race, class, and gender do not function independently in shaping economic outcomes — rather, they interact in ways that compound disadvantage. This framework, rooted in the work of scholars such as Kimberlé Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins, helps to explain why single motherhood is not a monolithic experience, but one profoundly shaped by the intersecting effects of systemic racism, economic marginalization, and gendered labor expectations.
Data from 2025 illustrate these disparities starkly. Black and Latina single mothers experience poverty rates that exceed 30%, compared to approximately 18% among their white counterparts (U.S. Census Bureau, 2025). These racialized gaps reflect not merely differences in income or employment, but legacies of structural exclusion. For example, Black single mothers are disproportionately concentrated in low-wage service industries, more likely to face employment discrimination, and more frequently denied access to affordable housing due to residual effects of redlining and credit discrimination. Latina single mothers, particularly those in mixed-status or immigrant families, often navigate additional barriers such as language access, exclusion from certain public benefits, and heightened vulnerability to wage theft in informal labor sectors.
Indigenous women — particularly those living on tribal lands or in remote rural areas — face some of the most acute structural burdens, including extreme housing precarity, insufficient access to licensed childcare providers, and limited availability of healthcare facilities. For Indigenous single mothers, the intersection of racialized colonial legacies, rural infrastructural neglect, and gendered caregiving burdens creates a context of systemic deprivation. These challenges are rarely addressed in mainstream policy debates, which often rely on a race-neutral, income-based framework that fails to capture the cumulative effects of settler colonialism, forced displacement, and cultural erasure.
Importantly, these disparities are not accidental. They are the consequence of centuries of exclusionary and extractive policy — from slavery and Jim Crow, to the displacement of Native populations, to 20th-century redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and welfare reforms designed to police and stigmatize poor women of color. The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), for example, codified work requirements and benefit time limits that disproportionately harmed Black and Indigenous single mothers, reinforcing a narrative of moral deficiency rather than addressing structural need.
When contemporary fiscal policy — whether through tax reform, benefit cuts, or the reintroduction of work requirements — reduces support for low-income families, it does not simply “tighten the budget” or “incentivize work.” It reactivates historical hierarchies under the guise of fiscal responsibility. Policies that claim to be race- or gender-neutral often ignore the reality that families of color, especially those led by single mothers, begin from vastly unequal starting points. Without race- and gender-conscious policy interventions, such measures perpetuate a status quo in which the economic burden is disproportionately borne by those already pushed to the margins.
In this context, an intersectional feminist lens is not a theoretical add-on but a necessary analytical tool — one that reveals how ostensibly neutral policies function as instruments of stratification when viewed through the lived experiences of those most impacted.
Democratic Representation and Policy Power
Between 2020 and 2025, women — and particularly working-class mothers — remained systematically underrepresented in the institutions where economic policy is crafted. While both major political parties continue to invoke the language of “family values” and “support for working families,” the composition of policymaking bodies rarely reflects the lived realities of the populations most affected by their decisions. As of 2025, only about 29% of U.S. Congressional seats are held by women, and within that group, fewer than one in ten members are single mothers or have directly experienced prolonged economic precarity (Center for American Women and Politics, 2025). Representation is even thinner within the specialized arenas that shape fiscal, welfare, and labor policy — such as House and Senate budget committees, state-level economic task forces, and executive advisory boards. These institutions remain dominated by individuals with high-income backgrounds, law and business credentials, and traditional family structures.
This representational gap is not just a matter of optics; it has material consequences. Policies designed for single mothers — whether related to tax credits, childcare, healthcare, or public assistance — are often conceived without the input or leadership of women who have navigated these systems firsthand. As a result, legislative frameworks tend to reflect assumptions rooted in ideological abstraction or economic theory rather than grounded knowledge of the daily trade-offs required to raise children alone, often while managing low-wage or unstable employment, unaffordable housing, and inaccessible healthcare.
Feminist theorists have long emphasized the political stakes of such exclusion. bell hooks, in her foundational work on intersectional feminism and liberation, reminds us that freedom is not merely about legal recognition or access to public goods — it is about having the power to “define the terms of one’s own survival.” In the context of social policy, this means more than consultative tokenism. It requires shifting decision-making power toward those who live at the intersections of race, class, gender, and caregiving — people who not only understand the gaps in existing systems but who carry the imagination to build more just alternatives.
Without this shift, even well-intentioned policies risk replicating paternalistic logics — treating single mothers as passive recipients of aid rather than as agents with knowledge, priorities, and political voices of their own. For example, programs that are designed to “incentivize work” may fail to acknowledge that many single mothers already work multiple jobs while providing full-time care. Requiring formal employment as a condition for benefits not only ignores this reality but reinforces a narrow definition of labor that excludes caregiving — a bias deeply rooted in both neoliberal economic models and patriarchal norms.
Bridging this gap requires more than increased female representation in abstract terms. It demands intentional inclusion of economically diverse women — especially single mothers of color — in the institutions where resource allocation and policy direction are debated and decided. Only through such structural inclusion can policymaking become truly democratic, responsive, and emancipatory.
Implications for Gender and Class Equity
The evidence is unequivocal: U.S. fiscal and social policy continues to be structurally biased in favor of affluent, dual-income, and nuclear family households. Despite periodic rhetoric about “supporting working families,” the architecture of American social provision — from tax codes to public benefit eligibility thresholds — implicitly assumes a model of economic stability and caregiving capacity that excludes, rather than accommodates, single-mother households. These exclusions are not evenly distributed. For single mothers, especially those who are Black, Latina, Indigenous, or immigrants, the consequences are wide-ranging and deeply entrenched.
Economically, these women face reduced access to key supports such as affordable childcare, health coverage, paid family leave, and housing subsidies. In many cases, they are excluded not due to outright denial, but because of structural barriers — inflexible eligibility requirements, underfunded programs, long waitlists, or benefit cliffs that penalize even modest income gains. This economic precarity makes long-term planning impossible and reinforces cycles of instability. As feminist economists have noted, these barriers are often described in the language of neutrality, but their effects are anything but neutral in practice.
Socially, the weight of unpaid care, persistent financial stress, and structural isolation contributes to chronic burnout and declining maternal mental health. Studies show that single mothers report higher rates of anxiety, depression, and sleep deprivation compared to partnered mothers, often linked to the dual burden of caregiving and breadwinning without adequate institutional support. These mental health challenges are not simply personal struggles — they are symptomatic of policy design that offloads systemic responsibilities onto individual women, expecting them to do more with less in conditions of persistent scarcity.
Structurally, the long-term implications are especially alarming. Limited access to quality early education, stable housing, and healthcare directly impacts the developmental outcomes of children raised in single-mother households. These constraints hinder intergenerational mobility, effectively reproducing the very economic inequalities that policy is meant to address. This dynamic contributes to what scholars describe as the feminization of poverty — a condition wherein women, and particularly single mothers, remain disproportionately represented among the poor due to the systemic undervaluing of care work and the absence of comprehensive social safety nets.
From a feminist public policy perspective, this pattern does not necessarily represent an explicit “war on poor people” in the ideological sense. Rather, it is more insidious: a persistent institutional neglect that perpetuates inequality through omission, inertia, and the refusal to restructure systems that were never designed with marginalized caregivers in mind. In other words, the status quo is not neutral — it is an active reproduction of privilege through the selective inattention to those who do not conform to dominant economic and familial norms. Addressing this requires more than rhetorical inclusion or short-term aid; it demands a transformation in how we value care, define work, and design policy to reflect the realities of diverse family structures.
We Want to Hear From You
This conversation is not the domain of experts alone — it belongs to all of us. Whether you are a policymaker, a student, a researcher, a single mother, or an ally, your voice holds critical value in shaping how we understand and respond to the realities of economic inequality and caregiving labor. Fiscal policy may appear abstract, but its effects are deeply personal. From stimulus payments to SNAP eligibility thresholds, from expanded child tax credits to the reinstatement of work requirements, these policy choices ripple outward — touching communities, shaping lives, and either widening or narrowing the gap between survival and stability.
We invite your insights, reflections, and lived experiences into this dialogue. How have recent policy shifts impacted your household, your workplace, your caregiving responsibilities, or your sense of dignity? What would it mean for fiscal policy to take seriously the work of caregiving — not as an afterthought or an exception, but as central to economic life? What might gender-conscious budgeting look like in practice — not just in rhetoric, but in the allocation of dollars, the drafting of eligibility rules, the structuring of time?
These are not abstract questions. They are foundational to the health of any democratic society. A truly inclusive and participatory democracy requires more than representation in office; it requires representation in policymaking processes, agenda-setting, and resource distribution. That means listening to — and learning from — those most affected: single mothers, low-wage caregivers, disabled parents, and communities historically excluded from policy design.
Feminist public policy insists that knowledge is not only held in institutions or published studies, but also in lived experience. When those experiences are taken seriously, policy becomes not only more just but more effective. It is through such collective engagement that we begin to dismantle inherited inequalities — and co-create the social systems that enable all families to thrive.
Questions to Further the Discussion
- How can future U.S. policies balance fiscal restraint with human-centered care for single-parent families?
- What role should intersectional data (race, class, gender) play in designing tax and welfare reforms?
- Should care work — especially unpaid childrearing — be recognized as an economic contribution in national budgets?
- How might bipartisan cooperation advance gender-equitable fiscal policy beyond election cycles?
- What can we learn from other nations that have successfully reduced single-mother poverty through sustained social investment?
Final Thought
Between 2020 and 2025, American fiscal policy swung sharply between crisis-driven generosity and post-crisis austerity — expanding the safety net at moments of political urgency, only to retract it in the name of inflation control and budget discipline. Amid these oscillations, single mothers have not been passive recipients of policy, but active participants in its outcomes — navigating shifting eligibility rules, absorbing the withdrawal of support, and filling institutional gaps with unpaid labor. Resilient, overworked, and chronically underrecognized, they have borne the weight of both pandemic relief and structural neglect.
From a nonpartisan feminist perspective, the task before us is not merely to critique policy cycles but to fundamentally reimagine them. The goal is not symbolic inclusion or crisis-based intervention, but the construction of a durable fiscal architecture that reflects the realities of caregiving economies. This means designing systems that center the value of care — not as charity or obligation, but as essential infrastructure. It means redistributing opportunity, time, and material support in ways that account for the structural disadvantages single mothers face across race, class, and citizenship. And it means recognizing single mothers not as statistical outliers or objects of policy, but as architects of the nation’s social and economic future — women whose labor, insight, and leadership are indispensable to any vision of collective well-being.
To build such a system is not simply a matter of political will, but of ethical clarity. The question is no longer whether we can afford to support single mothers — it is whether we can afford not to. – Tobi
References
- U.S. Census Bureau (2024). America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2024.
- Pew Research Center (2023). Household Income Trends Among Single Parents.
- National Women’s Law Center (2021). Women’s Job Losses in the COVID-19 Recession.
- Urban Institute (2025). Housing and Childcare Insecurity Among Single-Parent Families.
- U.S. Census Bureau (2022). Supplemental Poverty Measure Report.
- Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (2023). Child Poverty Doubled After Expiration of Expanded CTC.
- Congressional Budget Office (2025). Distributional Analysis of the House Fiscal Reform Bill.
- Brookings Institution (2022). Impact of the American Rescue Plan on Single-Parent Families.
- American Economic Association (2023). Effects of Work Requirements on Welfare Participation.
- Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025). Time Use Survey: Care Work by Gender and Family Structure.
- Institute for Women’s Policy Research (2024). Racial Disparities in Single-Mother Poverty.