Why Social Security Is So Important for Older Women

Conceived when the labor force was overwhelmingly male, the program has evolved over 90 years to serve working women, wives and widows

Martha C. White,

AARP

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En español

Published July 21, 2025

Connie Canby, 81, lives almost entirely on the Social Security survivor benefit she has received since her husband's death in 2023.

Lise Metzger

Nine decades after being signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Social Security has cemented its role as a pillar of retirement security, evolving from a Depression-era program focused on individual — and overwhelmingly male — workers to one designed to provide a financial backstop for families.

This evolution reflects a shift in culture as much as bureaucracy. As the nation’s population and workforce became larger and more diverse, Social Security benefits became broader and more inclusive.

In 1940, when Social Security began sending out monthly checks, men claiming benefits outnumbered women by nearly 8 to 1. At the end of 2024, women made up 54.5 percent of Social Security recipients and nearly 95 percent of those drawing benefits as the spouse or survivor of a higher-earning retiree.

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For millions of older women, facing financial circumstances shaped by historically restrictive gender norms, lingering income inequality and longer life spans, Social Security plays an especially vital role in safeguarding stability and independence. In a 2020 AARP survey marking Social Security’s 85th anniversary, two-thirds of women age 50 and older said they expected to rely substantially on their benefits in retirement, compared with just under half of men 50-plus.

Those gaps loom large for Cindy Hounsell, founder and president of the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement, a nonprofit organization focused on financial issues affecting older women. She recalls recently reviewing information on key contributors to poverty in older adults, such as fixed income, rising health costs and isolation.

“Out of five factors of what makes you poor in old age, I had four — and a lot of my friends did, too,” Hounsell says. “I was horrified.”

Changing norms, broader benefits

When it was conceived in the mid-1930s, Social Security reflected a different world. “It was really a model of a breadwinning husband and a wife who worked inside the home,” says Laura Quinby, associate director of research, employee benefits and labor markets at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

“This arrangement left the wife very unprotected in retirement,” Quinby says. “We ended up with a very high rate of widows’ poverty.”

a poster promoting social security for widows

A 1939 Social Security poster promotes the then-new beneifits for widows and children of deceased workers.

Social Security Administration

The program’s first moves to address women’s financial insecurity can be charted by the changing names of its agencies and programs. In 1939, Social Security expanded to include benefits for “dependent” spouses and survivors, and the office charged with enrolling and paying beneficiaries, the Bureau of Federal Old-Age Benefits, became the Bureau of Old-Age and Survivors Insurance. (It was eventually rolled into the Social Security Administration, or SSA.)

This evolution continued, slowly, as women moved into the workforce in larger numbers and social mores changed. Spousal and survivor benefits, initially limited to wives, became generally available to husbands in 1950. Benefits for divorced spouses were added in 1965, but only for women. (Divorced men would have to wait until the late 1970s, when a federal court ruling outlawed this gender distinction.) It wasn’t until 1983 that Congress passed legislation formally establishing gender neutrality in all benefit rules.

But while spousal and survivor benefits are now awarded to men and women on the same terms, they continue to play a much larger role in the lives and finances of older women, in large part because collecting them depends on having long-term lower earnings than their partner.

Legacy of lower earnings

As much as the world of work has changed in 90 years, women are still more likely to meet one of the main criteria for getting spousal or survivor benefits: The Social Security benefit they’ve earned on their own earnings record is less — often significantly less — than that of their mate. (If you qualify for two different benefits, such as retirement and survivor, Social Security won’t pay both combined; you’ll get whichever amount is higher.)

“Historically, a lot of women stayed home, or they would work part-time jobs that didn’t provide huge salaries,” Hounsell says. Many women of retirement age today took significant time off from jobs or careers to do the unpaid labor of raising children. Women are also more likely than men to step away from work to care for ailing loved ones.

According to federal data, women’s labor force participation still lags men’s by nearly 11 percentage points. And the wage gap, while narrowing, persists: On average, women earned 85 cents for every dollar a man earned in 2023, only 4 cents more than 20 years earlier, a Pew Research Center analysis found.

Over a 40-year work history, that adds up to a $400,000 difference in lifetime income. It’s a double whammy for older women’s retirement security, translating to both lower Social Security benefits (which are calculated from lifetime earnings) and significantly less savings. The median retirement account balance for women ages 55 to 64 is nearly 39 percent less than that for men of the same age, according to a May 2024 report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research drawn from U.S. Census Bureau data.

Combined with longer lives in retirement — the average U.S. woman who reaches age 65 will live another 20.7 years, compared with 18.2 years for men — those lesser resources pose a serious financial risk.

“There are many older women today who are reliant on [Social Security],” Quinby says. “Widow’s poverty is still very persistent.”

Hounsell says many older women don’t think about the fact that their income will drop in widowhood, when their household is no longer drawing two Social Security payments. “Not everybody knows or plans around the fact that they’re going to lose that other benefit,” she says. This can be financially destabilizing news during an already fraught period of transition.

Canby walks her dogs near her home in Colonial Beach, Virginia. "I'm figuring it out every day as I go," she says of surviving on Social Security, which provides about 80 percent of her former household income.

Lise Metzger

That’s the position in which Connie Canby found herself when her husband died in November 2023 after a 10-year battle with Parkinson’s disease. The Colonial Beach, Virginia, resident says she “started to panic” when she grasped her financial situation.

“It’s awful that the spouse loses when someone passes,” she says.

Canby, 81, is among the 15 percent of women (compared with 12 percent of men) who, according to SSA data, rely on Social Security for at least 90 percent of their income. In fact, it’s practically her only source of income. She managed a health food store and taught art classes during her working years; her husband did masonry. “Artists and bricklayers don’t have savings and don’t have 401(k)s,” she says.

Money is still tight — Canby says she seeks out pet-sitting gigs to earn extra cash and recently took out a home equity loan — but her survivor benefit amounts to about 80 percent of what she and her husband were living on before. “I’m figuring it out every day as I go,” she says.

A safeguard for spouses and survivors

Many older women collecting a Social Security retirement benefit don’t know they might be able to get a bigger payment because they are, or were, married to someone who had higher earnings, says James Sullivan, director of Medicare and Social Security counseling at Consumer Debt Counselors, a nonprofit debt relief organization based in Winter Park, Florida.

“They often find these programs confusing and don’t know who to talk to,” Sullivan says. He recounts the story of one client who immigrated to the U.S. as an adult and had a limited work history here, resulting in a meager Social Security retirement benefit.

“She wasn’t aware that she could file for a spousal benefit and would get the greater benefit” because her husband had much higher earnings, Sullivan says. “A lot of people, because of the complexity of both Medicare and Social Security, miss these opportunities to make these changes.”

That difference wasn’t huge, he notes — about $400 a month instead of $200. But for many retired women, even a small bump in benefits can make a noticeable difference in their day-to-day cash flow, says Charmaine Welsh, a financial wellness specialist at InCharge Debt Solutions, an Orlando-based nonprofit credit counseling service.

Welsh says having even a small amount of wiggle room in their budget relieves a tremendous amount of stress for her older clients who live primarily on Social Security.

“It’s important for them to see that leftover [money] where they can feel secure if something comes up, because most of the time, they don’t have family members or friends helping them out financially,” she says. “That will make them feel a lot more comfortable, knowing that it’s there and it’s coming in every month.”

How spousal and survivor benefits work

You may be eligible for Social Security spousal benefits if you earned significantly less during your working life than your partner (or if you didn’t work at all). Generally, you qualify if:

You are at least 62 years old.
Your spouse is receiving Social Security retirement or disability benefits.
You have been married to that person for at least a year.
The spousal benefit exceeds your own retirement benefit.

Spousal benefits can range from 32.5 percent to 50 percent of your spouse’s benefit amount, depending on your age when you claim them.

If you are claiming on the record of a former spouse, you must have been married to that person for at least 10 years.

In most cases, you’re eligible for survivor benefits if you’re at least 60 years old and were married for at least nine months before your spouse died. You may be able to apply as early as age 50 if you have a disability, or at any age if you are caring for children from the marriage or who are 16 or younger or have a disability.

If you remarry before you turn 60 (50 if you have a disability), you become ineligible for survivor benefits. If that marriage ends, you regain eligibility.

Survivor benefits range from 71.5 percent to 100 percent of what your late spouse (or ex-spouse) was eligible to receive from Social Security, depending on how old you are when you claim. If you are claiming based on childcare, you get 75 percent of the late spouse’s benefit. As with spousal benefits, you won’t get the survivor benefit and your own retirement benefit, but the higher of the two amounts.

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Martha C. White writes about business, finance and the economy. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, Time, NBC News, Money and other outlets.