Material and social deprivation among one-person households: the role of gender

We explore whether gender has a statistically significant impact on material and social deprivation of single adults after accounting for other characteristics. We use data from the 2022 European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey for six European countries. By assuming deprivation as an individual latent trait and by treating different deprivation levels as ranked categories, we estimate a proportional odds model separately by country. Our findings suggest a clear role for gender, i.e., the risk of being materially and socially deprived is relatively higher for women everywhere. The novelty is that facing “unexpected expenses” is the worst trouble for women, clearly coming from relative financial and economic fragility. Individual characteristics play a more important role than more aggregate indicators at explaining the risk of material and social deprivation. Finally, the estimated gender gap is robust to a large set of changes in model specification and assumptions.