Who is in Poverty and Why

Poverty is not randomly scattered across the population. It clusters around particular social groups whose risk of falling into and staying in poverty is markedly higher than average. Children, pensioners, lone parents, disabled people, some minority ethnic groups, and — cutting across all of these — women are over-represented among the poor. The patterning is not accidental: it reflects how the labour market, the family, the welfare system and discrimination interact to expose some groups to poverty more than others. This lesson maps who is in poverty and analyses why, introducing the key concept of the feminisation of poverty and preparing the ground for the cultural and structural explanations that follow.

Key Definition: Groups at risk of poverty are categories of the population — defined by age, household type, disability, gender or ethnicity — whose probability of experiencing low income and deprivation is significantly above the population average, because of their relationship to paid work, caring responsibilities, and the welfare system.

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Spec Mapping (AQA 7192 — Paper 2, Topics in Sociology, Section A: Work, Poverty and Welfare)

This lesson addresses the specification content on the social distribution of poverty:

• The groups in poverty — the social distribution of poverty across age, gender, ethnicity, household type and disability, and the reasons why particular groups are more at risk.
• It sits between the distribution lesson (the overall shape of inequality) and the explanations lessons (cultural and structural accounts): identifying who is poor frames the question of why, and tests rival explanations against the evidence.

Paper 2: a single essay paper (2 hours, 80 marks across two options): one 10-mark "analyse two…" question and one 20-mark "evaluate…" essay. Paper 2 essays are worth 20 marks, not 30.

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Synoptic Links

• Family (Paper 2): Household type is a primary axis of poverty risk — lone-parent households, large families and single pensioners. Links to family diversity, the domestic division of labour and the costs of children.
• Stratification (Paper 2): Gender, ethnic and class inequalities in poverty are applications of stratification theory; the feminisation of poverty applies feminist analysis directly.
• Theory (Paper 1/3): Feminist, Marxist and New Right perspectives offer competing accounts of why these groups are poor.
• Methods (Paper 1/3): Identifying who is poor depends on how poverty is measured (income vs deprivation; household assumptions), and on official statistics that may hide poverty within households.
• Education (Paper 1): Child poverty is the bridge to material deprivation explanations of educational underachievement.

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The Groups Most at Risk

The well-established sociological picture identifies several groups whose poverty risk is consistently above average. Described qualitatively (the accurate approach):

Group	Why their poverty risk is elevated
Children	Dependent on parental income; child poverty tracks the poverty of the household, and is higher in workless, lone-parent and large families. The "cycle of deprivation" concern attaches here.
Pensioners	Reliance on state pension and savings; risk concentrated among those without occupational pensions, older single women, and those who did not accumulate wealth. State support has reduced but not abolished pensioner poverty.
Lone parents	Combining earning with sole caring is difficult; often only one potential earner, high childcare costs, and reliance on benefits. Overwhelmingly headed by women, linking to the feminisation of poverty.
Disabled people	Lower employment rates, barriers in the labour market, and higher costs of living (the "extra costs" of disability), so income stretches less far.
Some minority ethnic groups	Labour-market disadvantage, discrimination, concentration in low-paid sectors, larger average household sizes in some groups, and area effects — though with substantial variation between and within groups.
The low-paid and insecure workers	The rise of "in-work poverty" means a job is no longer a guaranteed route out of poverty; low wages, part-time and insecure work leave many working households below the line.

Exam Tip: The single most important contemporary point is the rise of in-work poverty — the majority of people in poverty in recent decades live in households where someone works. This overturns the assumption that poverty is mainly about worklessness and is a powerful evaluative weapon against New Right dependency arguments.

Children

Child poverty is shaped almost entirely by the circumstances of the household: it is higher where parents are out of work, in lone-parent families, in larger families, and among some minority ethnic groups. Because children cannot alter their own circumstances, child poverty raises acute concerns about life chances (Weber) and the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage — links forward to both the cultural "cycle of deprivation" thesis and structural accounts.

Pensioners

Pensioner poverty has historically been significant, concentrated among those reliant on the state pension without occupational or private pensions. It is patterned by gender (older single women are particularly at risk, having accumulated less pension wealth across a working life interrupted by caring) and by class (manual workers with no occupational pension). State support has reduced the depth of pensioner poverty over time, but it has not eliminated it.

Lone parents

Lone-parent households face a structural bind: one adult must both earn and care, childcare is costly, and part-time low-paid work often leaves the household below the poverty line even when the parent is employed. Because the overwhelming majority of lone parents are women, lone-parent poverty is a major component of the feminisation of poverty.

Disabled people

Disabled people experience a double disadvantage: lower employment income (through labour-market barriers and discrimination) and higher living costs (the extra costs of disability — equipment, care, heating, transport). The same income therefore buys less, so a standard income-based poverty line understates their deprivation — a measurement point worth flagging. The disability employment gap (the difference between employment rates of disabled and non-disabled people) is substantial and persistent, reflecting both demand-side barriers (inaccessible workplaces, discrimination) and the way some jobs are incompatible with managing a health condition. Where disabled people are in work, they are over-represented in lower-paid and part-time roles, compounding the income shortfall.

Minority ethnic groups

Poverty rates are higher among some minority ethnic groups, reflecting labour-market discrimination, concentration in lower-paid and insecure sectors, larger average household sizes in some communities, and the spatial concentration of disadvantage. The crucial sociological caveat is heterogeneity: there is large variation between ethnic groups and within them, so blanket statements are inaccurate. Intersectionality (Crenshaw) is essential here — ethnicity interacts with gender and class to shape risk.

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The Dynamics of Poverty: Snapshots versus Spells

A vital but often-overlooked distinction is between who is poor at a single moment (a snapshot) and who experiences poverty over time (a dynamic view). Longitudinal evidence transformed our understanding of poverty by showing that the poor are not a fixed, static group.

• Transient versus persistent poverty. Some people experience poverty as a short spell triggered by a life event — job loss, relationship breakdown, the birth of a child, the onset of illness — and then escape. Others experience persistent or recurrent poverty, cycling in and out of low income, or remaining trapped for long periods.
• Trigger events. Poverty is frequently set off by transitions — losing work, family change, retirement, becoming disabled. This dynamic, life-course view connects directly to the concept of social exclusion as a process (Byrne) rather than a static state.
• The implication. Over a period of years, many more people touch poverty than appear in any single snapshot, because there is constant movement across the poverty line. But a smaller core experiences long-term, persistent poverty, and it is this group whose disadvantage is deepest and hardest to escape.

Exam Tip: Distinguishing the snapshot from the dynamic picture is a sophisticated move. It shows that "the poor" are not a homogeneous, permanent underclass (undermining Murray) while acknowledging that a persistently poor core exists. This nuance is exactly the kind of conceptual precision examiners reward.

This dynamic view sharpens the debate with cultural explanations: if poverty is often a temporary spell triggered by structural life events, it is hard to attribute it to a stable, transmitted "culture of poverty" — a point developed in the next two lessons.

The Cycle of Deprivation and Intergenerational Transmission

A long-running concern is whether poverty is passed down the generations — whether children who grow up poor are more likely to be poor as adults. This idea is captured in the notion of a cycle of deprivation, associated in British policy debate with arguments advanced in the 1970s that disadvantage is transmitted within families from parents to children.

There are two rival readings of any such transmission, and keeping them apart is essential:

Reading	Mechanism of transmission	Where the cause lies
Cultural (cycle of deprivation)	Poor values, attitudes and parenting "socialise" children into poverty	Inside the family/community (behaviour)
Structural (cycle of disadvantage)	Material deprivation, poor housing, under-resourced schools, weak local labour markets reproduce disadvantage	In the unequal distribution of resources and opportunities

• The cultural reading (which feeds Lewis's culture of poverty and Murray's underclass, covered next) holds that families transmit fatalism, low aspiration and dependency.
• The structural reading holds that what is really transmitted is material disadvantage and blocked opportunity — children inherit poor schools, deprived neighbourhoods and a weak local economy, not a defective culture. Bourdieu's concepts of economic and cultural capital (from Stratification and Education) explain how advantage and disadvantage are reproduced through resources rather than values.

Exam Tip: Whenever you mention the "cycle of deprivation", immediately distinguish the cultural from the structural interpretation and signal which the evidence supports. This single move demonstrates the cultural-vs-structural debate that runs through the whole option.

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The Feminisation of Poverty

A central concept in this topic is the feminisation of poverty — the observation that women are disproportionately represented among the poor, and that poverty is increasingly a female experience.

Key Definition: The feminisation of poverty refers to the disproportionate concentration of poverty among women, and the processes that expose women to a higher risk of poverty than men across the life course.

Feminist sociologists identify several interlocking reasons:

1. The gender pay gap and lower lifetime earnings. Women earn less on average and are concentrated in lower-paid, part-time and insecure work, especially after having children.
2. Caring responsibilities. Women perform the majority of unpaid domestic and caring labour (echoing Oakley's work on the housewife role and the dual burden), interrupting and constraining their paid employment and pension accumulation.
3. Lone parenthood. Most lone parents are women, combining sole earning with sole caring.
4. Pension poverty in old age. Interrupted working lives mean women accumulate less pension wealth and face higher poverty risk as older single women.
5. Hidden poverty within households. A key feminist point: because poverty is measured at household level on the assumption that income is shared equally, the poverty of women within apparently non-poor households is rendered invisible. Where resources are distributed unequally inside the home (men retaining more for personal spending), women may experience deprivation that official statistics never capture.

Exam Tip: The "hidden poverty within households" point is a high-value evaluative move: it simultaneously makes a feminist argument and a methodological criticism of how poverty is measured, linking two skills at once.

The processes feeding the feminisation of poverty can be visualised as a reinforcing cycle:

flowchart TD
  A["Gendered division of unpaid caring labour"] --> B["Interrupted, part-time, lower-paid employment"]
  B --> C["Lower lifetime earnings and pay gap"]
  C --> D["Less accumulated pension and savings"]
  D --> E["Higher poverty risk, especially as lone parents and older women"]
  E --> A

Evaluation of the feminisation thesis

Strengths:

• Captures a real, well-documented pattern and connects it to the structures of patriarchy and the labour market (Walby's structures of patriarchy).
• The hidden-poverty point exposes a genuine limitation of household-based measurement.

Criticisms:

• The picture is not uniform: women's labour-market position has improved over time, and some argue "feminisation" risks overstating a trend that varies by age and cohort.
• Intersectionality complicates a single "women's poverty" story — class and ethnicity strongly modify women's risk; a professional woman and a lone mother on benefits do not share the same experience.

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Why These Groups? Competing Explanations

The patterning of poverty is the battleground for the rival explanations developed in the next two lessons. In outline:

• New Right (cultural/behavioural): Groups are poor partly because of behaviour, choices and dependency — lone parenthood, worklessness and a "dependency culture" (Murray). Poverty is, in this view, partly self-inflicted and reinforced by an over-generous welfare system.
• Structural (Marxist, Weberian, feminist): Groups are poor because of how the system distributes opportunities — labour-market exploitation and low pay, discrimination, the inadequacy of benefits, and patriarchy. Poverty is imposed by structures, not chosen.
• The decisive evidence: The rise of in-work poverty is hard for purely behavioural accounts to explain — if most poor households contain a worker, then poverty cannot mainly be about an unwillingness to work, which supports structural (low-pay) explanations.