Poverty policy is an intrinsically gendered issue. American poverty law shuttles the needy households with dependent children into their own special program, namely TANF. The data indicate that an overwhelming majority of the adults who are actually participating in the TANF program, or who may need poverty assistance, are women. In 1998 about 68.7 percent of all TANF households had one adult present, 7.3 percent had two adults, and 24 percent were “child-only” (typically families in which a child is being cared for either by a parent who is receiving Supplemental Security Income, or by a parent who is an undocumented immigrant, or by a poor parent who has fallen afoul of TANF's nonfinancial eligibility rules, or by a parent who is an undocumented immigrant, or by a relative of the parent). The widely circulated governmental reports on the TANF program do not include gendered data. Policy experts who have combed through the governmental data suggest that about 90 percent of the adult TANF recipients are women.

We can also arrive at a rough estimate of the gender breakdown in the population that ought to be served by TANF by looking at the data on poor families. About 61 percent of poor families with at least one adult and one dependent child present are female-headed; 32 percent are couple-headed; and 7 percent are male-headed.