Family, Work, and Benefits for Hispanic Women

In the last chapter we documented the extent of benefit disadvantage among Hispanic males and showed the particularly precarious situation of Mexican-origin men. The data make it clear that those disadvantages result from multiple sources including human capital deficits and labor market factors that confine large numbers of Hispanic male workers to low-paying jobs in construction, agriculture, and the service sector and in small firms that do not offer health or retirement benefits. In this chapter we examine the situation of adult Hispanic women and ask how their access to benefits is affected by marriage, as well as their own employment. For women, and especially for those whose culture places great value on the family and defines a woman’s core roles as those of wife and mother, dependency on a male partner is common. Yet given limited earnings and the lack of benefits among Hispanic males, for many Hispanic women marriage is no guarantee of economic security or access to health insurance or retirement income. As is the case for lower class African-American women, for a large fraction of Hispanic women the traditional male-breadwinner model of family economic security no longer operates, if indeed it ever did, and the future marriage market for Hispanic females may operate very differently than it has in the past. For women in general, their unique economic vulnerabilities can be traced in large part to the fact that the employment-based benefit system that emerged after World War II in the United States was firmly based on the male-breadwinner model of family economic security. That model, which was historically precarious for lower class woman, has become increasingly unreliable in assuring a family’s economic security.