What Is the Effect of Racial Disparities on Entitlement to Social Security Survivor Benefit and Widow Poverty?

Survivor benefits insure spouses with low lifetime earnings, following the death of a higher-earning spouse. We focus on three factors that influence the availability and magnitude of survivor benefits and differ for women by race and ethnicity: trends in marriage; earnings and employment differences between spouses; and claim ages. First, we find that the broad retreat from marriage masks important changes in non-marital states. Less educated white women experienced greater declines in marriage rates, yet less educated Black women experienced greater declines in divorce after marriages long enough to entitle them to survivor benefits and greater increases in nonmarriage. Second, Black women who are married have substantially longer work histories and slightly higher lifetime earnings than white women, whereas their husbands are heavily disadvantaged in both length of employment and relative earnings, compared to white men. Third, the husbands of Black women claim retired-worker benefits earlier than the husbands of white or Hispanic women, though this is partly offset by claiming more Social Security Disability Insurance, which protects survivor benefits; and Black women claim survivor benefits earlier than white or Hispanic women. Each of these factors reduces survivor benefits for Black women. Combining them together, we find that the hypothetical increase in poverty for white women in old age, had they not been married, would be considerably greater than the hypothetical decline in poverty for Black women, had they been married to an available husband and then widowed. Thus, Black women are substantially disadvantaged in their access to survivor benefits.